Yes, it’s a book igloo. Good for surviving in the harsh elements of a public library.

And it’s not even an episode of the Walking Dead

A baby, presumed stillborn, revives after 12 hours in a refrigerated morgue after the mother demands to see her one last time.

Well, it’s good to see we can agree on what’s important

Canada and Denmark have come to a deal that would split the contentious Hans Island, a barren piece of Arctic rock in the middle of nowhere in particular. The uninhabited island will be divided in half, presumably so that puffins can enjoy the benefits of universal health care.

No, I won’t be quiet, wanna fight about it?

You will soon be able to drink alcohol in B.C. movie theatres. Which based on my experience at hockey and baseball games should be roaring success. Nothing bad has ever come out of having alcohol at those venues.

“I don’t give quotes for fear of being misquoted,” he said.

As a writer, I can’t understand the point of plagiarizing anybody. Certainly, I’m no Gene Weingarten, but I enjoy writing in my own distinct style and using my own peculiar vocabulary. Although if you’re going to plagiarize anybody in the google era, you should at least make an attempt to jumble up the story a little bit.

Now this is a good advertisement

The CBC might want to take notes.

Yes, it’s yet another article about the Titanic

But it’s not just any article. It’s by Daniel Mendelsohn of the New Yorker, and the story is well-researched, well-crafted, and above all very compelling. By the by, does anyone recall singing this song at summer camp?

Irony of ironies, Gloria Stuart, the woman who played 100-year-old Rose Dawson in James Cameron’s epic Titanic in 1997, died in 2010 at the age of… 100. She was two years old when the Great Ship went down.

The day evil was defeated

It was 67 years ago today that the Nazi death camp Buchenwald near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion. The soldiers found 21,000 emaciated survivors:

“As we got close to the camp and saw what was inside… a terrible, terrible fear and horror entered our hearts. We thought, what is this? Where are we going? Why are we here? And as you got closer to the camp and started to enter the camp and saw these human skeletons walking around—old men, young men, boys, just skin and bone, we thought, what are we getting into? ”

—A Canadian airman’s recollection of his arrival at Buchenwald

All the news not fit to print, but works in a pinch when you’re out of toilet paper.

Lorena Bobbitt has some new competition

This puts new meaning to the term “got you by the balls.” Or perhaps it’s the old meaning after all.

Christians versus atheists: Round 3

First, Christians put up a sign in a park reading: “Jesus died for our sins.” The sign was soon attended by a second sign reading: “Nobody died for our sins. Jesus Christ is a myth.” Score: 1-1. And then the atheist sign disappeared altogether.

The power of music

This is a beautiful, sad, wonderful video about the way music can act to heal people, or at the very least to restore some part of our humanity. The good stuff is about four minutes in so don’t get sidetracked and put off by the slow start.

How many thoughtless and stupid people are there in the world?

The answer is a lot.

God bless artists

This video shows a time-lapsed movie of an artist creating a water colour drawing. It is a beautiful and rather moving image in its simultaneous simplicity and complexity. I could swear those eyes were real.

Like a trolling stone

I’m not sure if this is parody, but Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com has a list of the top 10 most overrated songs of all time. And it’s basically a who’s who list of songs that could probably be on anybody’s top 10 list, including such untouchable classics as Stairway to Heaven, London Calling, and Satisfaction (although honestly, the last one does get annoying after the first 10,000 plays).

But the blasphemy to say that Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone is “lazy and stupid” is profoundly ironic. A lazier, stupider comment could not be made of one of America’s most celebrated poets of the past 50 years. It isn’t Bob Dylan’s fault that Shapiro isn’t bright enough to appreciate lyrical genius.

This could have been Obama’s “My Pet Goat” moment

We interrupt this breaking news event of a terrorist attack to give you a presidential rendition of Where The Wild Things Are. And in the event you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth checking out Christopher Walken’s version.

If you like guns, you’ll love this

From theblaze.com, the six top newest guns Israel could avail themselves of should a war break out with Iran. Or, anybody else silly enough to mess with Israel.

What are the two most offensive sounds you can think of?

If you said bongos and bagpipes, you’re right. I think perhaps my ancestors left Scotland in the first place to get away from bagpipes. I can’t be sure, of course, but it’s a safe bet.

Dredging the outhouse of news journalism

It’s bad enough that journalists feel the need to report on how much the mayor of Toronto says he weighs. But when the man pushing this contrivance of news doesn’t even show up to his regularly scheduled photo-op, you’d think the press in Toronto could find something else to write about. I said you’d think that. But you’d be wrong.

The blood-letting at the CBC begins

Gone are new 88 jobs, the cancellation of Connect, which airs on CBC News Network, and the radio show Dispatches, which will take effect in June, documentaries will be reduced and the South American and Africa bureaus will be closed.

Chances of the CBC making changes to programming and content that will cause viewers to tune in, thus driving up revenues, and enabling the Mother Corp to rehire these people and reopen closed foreign bureaus? Probably zero.

For those of you who work for the government, Happy Easter Monday. I hope you enjoyed your day off. For the rest of the world, belated Happy Easter Friday. For those of you who are devout Christians, I suppose the happy day was the Monday and not the Friday.

And now, following up on yesterday’s wildly popular and successful list of useless links and trivial information:

The Titanic has nothing on the MV Dona Paz

If you’ve read about or watched James Cameron’s sloppy lovefest about the Titanic, you might, quite wrongly, believe that it was history’s great maritime disaster. To quote George Costanza, the Titanic “eased into the water like an old man into a nice warm bath” in comparison to the 1987 maritime disaster in the Phillipines when the MV Dona Paz creamed into the MT Vector fuel tanker and created a rain of fiery death on the ocean.

Checklist of horror:

1. Ridiculous number of people perished.
2. Almost no survivors whatsoever.
3. Both ships caught on fire.
4. The ocean caught on fire.
5. There were no lifejackets.
6. No rescue came for 16 hours.
7. The ocean was known for man-eating sharks.
8. The disaster is believed to have killed 1,000 children under the age 4.

Canada’s F-35 fiasco is about par for the course

From the esteemed Matthew Fisher comes an op-ed about sole source fighter jet contracts and the reality of military procurements. The salient bit:

Let’s live in the real world. Unless Canada decides drastically to change its defence strategy and becomes pacifist and isolationist, we will continue, as we have done for a century, to commit ourselves to military alliances and partnerships to further our national interests. To be worthy allies and partners we have to be more than peacekeepers uttering platitudes — the bulwark of the Liberal defence strategy for years.

Basically, we need to spend the money to keep up with the Joneses. Or in this case, with our allies in NATO. Although I think the possibility of conflict with Russia or China in 20 years is remote, Fisher hits most of the nails on the head.

(via the esteemed Mark Collins)

And here you though 3 1/2″ floppy disks didn’t have a purpose in a modern world

The link.

An early candidate for mother of the year?

Texting and driving is darwinistic enough. This San Diego mother did it while driving with her baby in her lap and her kids in the back seat without seat belts on.

No n-word and f-word for this CNN reporter

The direct quote comes at 1:55.

As always, YouTube commenters live up to their reputation:

Let’s do this all over again in a few years

In the event that hell freezes over and the NDP are ever elected to federal government, Thomas Mulcair would like very much to restore the gun registry. I can foresee a series of taxpayer-wasting games of legislative pong here, with the Conservatives scrapping the registry and then every few years the Liberals and NDP bringing it right back again in the same way they’ve been doing with the Court Challenges Program.

The CBC is the great protector of American culture in Canada

An excerpt from a very lengthy piece entitled “Salvaging the Unsalvageable: The Inside Story of Richard Stursberg and CBC TV”:

The CBC seems never to have been comfortable with the idea that its television mandate should be to create and exhibit distinctively Canadian entertainment shows. At the height of its power and wealth, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, its prime-time schedule featured almost no Canadian drama or comedy. Instead, prime time was a mix of U.S. entertainment shows, with Canadian news, documentaries and public affairs filling up the schedule. This was surprising not simply because the CBC made little or no attempt to address English Canada’s greatest cultural challenge, but also because—even then—there was no shortage of Canadian news available elsewhere.

Do yourself a favour and read the entire piece.

(via Jesse Ferreras)

This is why the death penalty is a superb idea

You’ll have to take my word for it that if you have any lingering doubts that rapists should receive swift and permanent justice, download the podcast for The Moth from March 26 entitled “Barbara Wiener.” You’ll linger no longer.

Just a collection of links, pictures and esoterica.

Because this excuse works so well with the wife

I really thought the Conservatives were going to find a deep hole on this one, hide inside for a while and scuttle the F-35 fiasco where nobody could find it. But instead you’ve got defence minister Peter MacKay coming on television in order to make some ridiculous claim that the $10 billion discrepancy between the government figures and the auditor general is “a different interpretation” of accounting.

Oy vey. This is pretty shoddy excuse-making, Peter. If this were an excuse-making competition and I were one of the judges, I’d give that swan dive a four out of 10. I’m not sure how many hours it took to come up with that one, but I’d fire your joke writer. Look, if you knew the actual costs for years and kept telling Canadians a different number, you can call it “a different interpretation” all you want. Us regular folks call it a “bait and switch.”

Ridiculously stupid people are everywhere on the Internet

I don’t know how or why Internet meming started, but it’s reached epic proportions. These days all it takes to get some stupid meme going is to find a random picture without knowing the identity of the person, the context of the photograph, or anything at all about the subject matter, and then make a joke about it using lettering on the photo.

The latest craze is some guy who was snapped looking casual while running a 10k race. Dubbed “ridiculously photogenic guy” there’s now a Facebook fan page, literally hundreds of thousands of meme jokes, and women everywhere wondering if this fellow is single. You know what this indicates to me? We need a violent, bloody, third world war, because we clearly have far too much time on our hands. Any of these bozos still camped out in New York City whining about the one per cent and the 99 per cent need only to look at Internet meming to realize that, if anything, life is too damned relaxing.

I call this “little brother feeling left out so he acts up syndrome”

I’m not quite sure why atheists feel the need to harass Christians on holidays with self-righteous nonsense. And I write this as an atheist. If you don’t believe in God, good for you. Then stop caring about it and let everybody who does believe in God do their thing in peace. Unless they’re crucifying you, it’s not really harming anybody, is it? If you think something is silly, ignoring it is a far stronger statement than validating it by setting yourself at odds with it.

Sadly, the blogs still lead the media in investigative reporting

Racist shooters go on killing rampage of black people in Oklahoma, reports the CBC. No possible motive is mentioned in the article, but according to the Blaze, this incident might very well be an American History X version of retribution by a man whose father was killed.

Hubris, thy name is Apple

Rejoice, for every snobby Mac user who, when you told them you had a computer virus, showed no sympathy and instead told you to go and buy a $3,000 Apple product instead.

Eye colour: Not sure

I was doing a self-portrait with my camera and when I increased the light I realized my eyes aren’t just brown like I’d always assumed. Looks like when the genetics fairy was handing out colours he hid my father’s green eyes in there somewhere too.

Personally, I think eyes are pretty awesome.

Hooooo boy.

It’s times like this that I wish my former blogmate Mark Collins was still here because while the F-35 fiasco is well above my pay grade, he’s been dubious of the entire procurement since day one. And while I have to admit that I don’t know enough about fifth generation fighter jet technology to produce more than a few crudely drawn words on a cocktail napkin, it doesn’t take much expertise to realize the defence department just stepped into a Jurassic Park-sized deposit of dino waste.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s rather confusing. I mean, the NDP are asking for defence minister Peter MacKay to resign for not knowing what he should have known, unless in fact he did know, which is much worse, though he claims he absolutely didn’t. Or as one Macleans magazine pundit put it, if a massive abuse of procedure and accountability falls in the forest, but no one is named, blamed and shamed as the culprit, did it ever really happen?

Clearly, somebody, somewhere in the government is due to take a very short walk off a long pier. Do you fire the military commanders who clearly did everything they possibly could to acquire the F-35s without undergoing proper procurement procedures and then fabricating a list of things they needed in a fighter jet so that the list dovetailed nicely with the specs for the F-35?

Or do you fire the people in the defence department who didn’t tell their superiors about the impending mountain of aforementioned dino doo doo about to fall on their heads? Or do you expect the defence minister to accept Thomas Mulcair’s suggestion that the loonie stops at the minister’s desk, and offer his resignation so that Stephen Harper can shuffle him some place else?

Or do you turf Julian Fantino, the man who is currently backing away from the spotlight as quickly and unsubtly as a man wearing orange at a St.Patty’s Day parade? Please don’t look at me, I just work here. One gets the sense, however, as one reads through older news articles quoting Fantino, that the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, and the language of the minister for military procurement had been evolving from certainty about the necessity of F-35s to one very much ambiguous that they might be jets at all, and not flying ponies or something.

The bad news is the Auditor-General’s report puts a giant cannon-sized hole in the F-35 procurement and its budget. The bad news is that the procurement appears to be manipulated to ensure a sole-sourced, untendered contract with Lockheed Martin which has or has not been signed, depending on which part of the government you ask at a certain part of the day.

The bad news is that the defence minister and the procurement minister had no idea about any of this, depending on which part of their mouths you believe when they’re speaking. The bad news is that the defence department itself told the House of Commons that cost data provided by US authorities had been validated by US experts and partner countries, which was not accurate at the time.

Ok, that’s all the bad news. Well, probably not, but it’s probably enough for now. On to the not-so-bad news. The Conservative government, while deservingly drowning in its own arrogance for shouting down those who suggested the whole deal was rotten from the start, is not really complicit in this scandal so much as it is woefully negligent. At the very least they seem to be taking some responsibility now, have frozen spending on the program, spanked the defence department, and handed oversight over to a committee of deputy ministers.

Is it at all ironic that the man whom was hired as part of transparency and accountability legislation brought in by the Conservative government was the one who foreshadowed all of this long ago by saying the government’s numbers on this contract were wrong? And does it make it even more ironic that this same man who estimated the costs were nearly $10 billion greater than the government was saying gets by on a departmental budget of $1.8 million? Perhaps the feds should cut Kevin Page’s budget to $49 and give him coupons to Tim Hortons so he won’t cause so much trouble in the future.

The only actual good news I can pull from all this is that the money for these jets hasn’t yet been wasted, which saves Harper his Airbus A320 moment in power. Which is sort of like finding a wooden plank to float on after stepping off the Titanic. And as Harper is to Rose, who will play the role of Jack, slipping quietly into the deep blue sea?

I wrote a column for my newspaper this week about the budget. Sufficed to say it isn’t very flattering, but nor does it take into context Canada’s position relative to other nations. It may be true that, all things considered, Canada is doing as good or better than other nations, but that wasn’t the scope of this op-ed. What this piece looks at is the context of the budget in terms of spending and jobs cuts, and the Conservative’s first opportunity to present a budget unhindered by the opposition:

In like a lion, out like a lamb.

That’s how I would describe the 2012 federal budget announced March 29 to the great anticipation of many, because this is the first time a majority government has delivered a budget since 2003.

continue reading…

I’ll gladly entertain discussion after you’ve read the article.

Liberal Member of Parliament Justin Trudeau (L) and Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau fight during their charity boxing match in Ottawa March 31, 2012. REUTERS/Chris Wattie.

Well, my first foray back into the world of blogging about federal politics didn’t go so well the other day, as my piece about Justin Trudeau’s three round love tap with Senator Patrick Brazeau was resoundingly disliked by both Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals, because I dared decry the dauphin his due, and Conservatives because I questioned whether Patrick’s black belt had been dipped in the wrong colour dye.

Indeed, one fellow who commented on my blog suggested both his three-year-old son and Brazeau would maul me in the ring, should my courage ever approach a level whereby I would be willing to test myself against both a politician and a toddler. And while I suggest the fellow might be correct about his son, I’m still not going to give poor Patrick a break here. And anyway, being beaten by a three-year-old would not be some kind of great feat, as my own children can attest in victories of both a physical, but more definitely a psychological nature.

I also received fan mail from Liberals, who suggested I doth protest greatly or something, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and that Justin was every bit the champion of his father. One even demanded I email him a picture of myself, so that he could ascertain to what extent my physical appearance might be responsible for the obvious intellectual deficit that God Himself had saddled me with at birth.

But it didn’t end there. No, friends and frenemies, I also received a very terse letter from the “Sun News Network” about referring to their TV channel as “Sun TV” when they very clearly are not just “Sun TV”, but the “Sun News Network.” And although the word “Sun” and the medium on which they deliver their message is pretty much a colloquial commonality on Twitter, I suppose you’d get the same sort of angry reaction if you referred to Wayne Gretzky as “The Great Juan.” And I have now watched the full broadcast, thanks for asking.

I digress. Clearly, I was not clear enough that I did not view this gladiatorial debacle as the touchstone for our generation, a sort of 2012 version of my father’s 1972 Summit Series, or in any way, shape, or form, an indictment or validation of the grit and character of either fighter. I mean, if we were to adjudicate the character of men based on amateur boxing matches of a real or fictitious nature, then Sylvester Stallone would the President of the United States (which given the present state of affairs might not be such a bad idea).

But some writers and columnists went farther than I did in interpreting the meaning of this boxing match. My fellow Afghan war tourist Andrew Potter suggested that the two fighters “demonstrated more courage, sportsmanship, mutual respect and yes, honour, than most of their colleagues will in their entire careers in Parliament.” Which I suppose just goes to show that when you set the bar in ankle-deep water, nobody should be surprised when it turns out those people can swim. Or to put it another way, hyperbole hath no bedfellow so great as the managing editor for the Ottawa Citizen.

Even Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star took the opportunity to one-up Potter’s upsucking, opining that the sort of leadership demonstrated inside the ring has reawakened his contention for the Liberal leadership. How did he do this? Why, by proving that “a wealthy socialist dilettante who had once tried to paddle a canoe to Cuba” can best a man in a boxing ring, a thing that truly has never been done by anybody in the history of the world, excepting Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps a few thousand other people who I’m sure aren’t important.

But look, I do admire the courage it takes to get into a boxing ring for a gruelling six minutes with heavy 16 ounce gloves drenched in sweat and wearing nothing to protect one’s face but two inches of absorbent padding. I’ve never done it myself and to be honest I’m unsure I ever will. But then, I don’t think the prospect of my getting the stuffing knocked out of me would generate very much money for charity except in pity, nor would the Sun News Network have a vested interest in broadcasting my hubris unless I were hired by the CBC tomorrow.

Sufficed to say, for those people who were hurt by my comments about Justin, I’m certain he’ll find a way to carry on despite those remarks at four times the annual income of the average Canadian and who will be eligible for an MPs pension in about two years time, which is 40 years earlier than I’m ever likely to retire. And as for Patrick Brazeau, he too is likely consoled by his 38-year job security in the Canadian Senate, which is about 38 years longer than most Canadians enjoy.

Nevertheless, and at the risk of now flogging the rotting equine corpse, I do agree with Potter on one thing. It took “an honest-to-goodness fist fight” to raise the level of civility in Ottawa from passive aggressive swearing and sarcastic Twitter updates to settling the issue as our forebears used to, which is likely where the expression “beating the sense into him” comes from.

Liberal MP Justin Trudeau in a charity boxing match for cancer research Saturday, March 31, 2012 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand

UPDATE: The National Post put this on their website, so check out the comments there if you’d like.

Canadians who have waited 50 years to see a Trudeau laid out on the floor will have to wait even longer following the Liberal MPs surprising underdog boxing victory against Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau last night. Although I didn’t watch the fight or what I hear were silly pre-fight antics on the Sun News Network broadcast, I followed the updates on Twitter to learn that the shiny pony (a nickname bestowed on him by Sun News Network pundit Ezra Levant) earned a measure of revenge against his naysayers with a third-round referee stoppage.

And who could blame us for believing Brazeau had this in the bag? I mean, he was younger, heavier, a former Canadian Forces member and to top it all off he’s a black belt in Karate. Which I suppose just goes to show that a black belt in anything doesn’t preclude the possibility of getting your ass kicked. Or to quote Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Why did so many people want Trudeau to lose anyway? Sure, he’s had his share of awkward moments in the spotlight and joins fellow MP Bob Rae for biggest reactionary in the party, but I don’t think he is deserving of all the dislike. No, I figure that’s owed to a man we’re no longer able to reach, his father. It wasn’t Justin, after all, who led as Liberal prime minister for 16 years, it was his father. And as the saying goes, the son should not be responsible for the sins of the father.

To a certain extent, Justin isn’t completely exempt from his father’s deeds. After all, where would Justin be otherwise? Certainly not the self-entitled Dauphin who followed up his silver spoon upbringing with a hereditary entrance into politics on the shoulders of his father. His electability without the Trudeau name in Quebec is dubious. As the other saying goes, he is a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.

Justin didn’t invent the “just society” and “official multiculturalism”, nor did he alienate western Canada in perpetuity with the creation of the NEP. He has inherited our dislike by being the son of the man responsible for these things, and though he does much to invite scorn by celebrating these legacies, it’s unsurprising for a son to carry on the work of his father.

I think the bigger picture here is that it’s been obvious from the outset that Justin lacks the intellectual capacity of his father, he is rash to judgement, poor at public speaking, demonstrates little leadership ability, and has none of the qualifications that men like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff possessed, though those leaders fell considerably short in other areas. What Justin does possess is curly locks of hair, dimples, and a famous surname. In other words, he makes a great mascot.

Beyond all of this analysis, however, we should remember that this was nothing more than a trivial sideshow for charity, and but for the violence was far more sedate than the sort of childishly embarrassing fighting that goes on in the House of Commons on a regular basis. Putting aside the vitriol from those who took this boxing match a little too seriously, it was nice to see politicians doing something that wasn’t purely motivated by self-interest for once.

You know your electoral system isn’t very high tech when Afghanistan uses the same process.

In the wake of the federal NDP leadership vote the choice of former Liberal Thomas Mulcair was overshadowed by the fact that the online voting system was plagued by delays due to cyber attacks by hackers. News of the delays generated poor reviews of the voting system on social media, as it was roundly mocked and derided.

Some of that was the obligatory partisanship delighting in the futility of a vote that was so delayed the CBC decided to broadcast footage of a pigeon stuck in the convention centre. But even NDP voters seemed frustrated and embarrassed by the result, leading many people to suggest online voting has no future in politics.

But why not? Clearly, online voting should be viewed as the most urgent and dire need to address the huge democratic deficiencies in our electoral system. At present, we have federal elections that generate a turnout of half the eligible voting population, provincial elections that produce a third, and municipal elections that have elected leaders with a tiny minority of the voting public. The wherefores have been discussed and debated at great length, but it seems to me that the best way to fight against increasing voter apathy is to modernize our electoral system.

I don’t see why it can’t be done. We’re already able to file our personal, confidential tax information online without fear and paranoia it will be intercepted by hackers. And even if you do use a tax accountant, the chances are that he or she also files electronically on your behalf.

Then there’s Employment Insurance. No longer do you have to go and stand in a lineup at some suburban government building to fill out forms. You simply log in to your computer and apply for eligibility, mail in your employer work sheets, and then fill out electronic statements every week stating whether you’ve found employment or not.

Electronic banking is now an afterthought by most people. The TD-Canada Trust advertisements with the old men sitting on the park bench arguing about how banking is too convenient could be perfectly applied to voting. Is it really necessary to walk to your bank, wait in a lineup, present identification, all on the hours of the bank?

No, of course not. Online banking now allows people to make purchases with their cell phones immediately, transfer funds, pay bills, all by transferring personal information electronically. This is done by millions of people millions of times a day, every single day.

But more than the logistics of online voting, it’s important to address the disenfranchised people of our society who, for various reasons, can’t make it out to a voting booth. Yes, there are special allowances to mail in votes and advance polling stations, but I think we can go farther.

Making it simple for the elderly, infirm, or the otherwise indisposed to vote in the comfort of their own homes should increase voter turnout and more accurately represent the true political makeup of the country (or as close as is possible under the flawed First Past The Post electoral system).

Speaking anecdotally, my wife doesn’t vote. It’s not because she doesn’t want to, but as a mother of two children she really doesn’t have that much time in the day to get out and cast her ballot. It’s not an excuse or a copout. It’s not as though she really wanted to vote very badly and literally couldn’t find her way to the ballot box.

But I think that she is like many Canadians who feel a desire to vote, but when voting day comes it just doesn’t work out for one reason or another. When I asked her if she would vote in every election if all she had to do was log onto an online voting system, she said definitely, yes.

We live in a wired world now, where even socializing is more commonly thought of in terms of Twitter and Facebook than getting together with friends for beers. Technology has allowed for the modernization of our economy so that almost anything can be purchased by anyone at any time anywhere in the world.

Why would we possibly reject the same possibility for our democracy? Why would we not allow our citizens, no matter where they are in the world, to log on to the internet, enter in some personal information to verify their identity, and cast their vote? It makes sense.

It would also be much cheaper to let people vote electronically. Not only would the robocalls controversy be rendered utterly meaningless because nobody would have stories to tell about going to voting stations that don’t exist, but Elections Canada wouldn’t need to spend millions on acquiring space and hiring workers.

The NDP leadership vote might have demonstrated some of the flaws, but that doesn’t mean you throw the baby out with the bath water.

Counterpoints

To be fair, here are some arguments against electronic voting:

The hard lesson of the NDP’s Internet voting failure
If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online?

About a month ago I got into an argument on Twitter with a woman whom has been a sponsor of mine for a couple of years. I didn’t really mean to get into an argument with her, but I enjoy friendly debate so much that I sort of let myself be sucked into the quick retorts, which is an easy trapping of the Twitter medium.

The argument quickly devolved into ridiculous accusations by the woman, followed by her withdrawal of support. This was regrettable, not because I lost support, but because I didn’t mean to offend her. At the same time I was unable to walk away when it was clear she was becoming emotionally invested in the conversation and was clearly not being a rational actor.

It all began with an innocent tweet about the Liberals discussing the possibility of legalizing marijuana at their annual general meeting. Now, as far as I remember, the context of the tweet was nothing more than an automatic message created when I pressed a button on a media website. I do this roughly 30 times every day when I come across interesting pieces of news and information, a routine I enjoy because I get to share ideas and stories with Twitter followers.

I think when I first received the tweet from her, I was taken aback because I didn’t really even remember the context of her remark. For whatever reason, she had interpreted my tweet as some kind of implicit support for the Liberals and marijuana, whereas none was stated or even implied. As I tried to explain myself, I found myself confessing that although I’m not endorsing the Liberals or their policy, I don’t really have a problem with legalizing marijuana. More on this later.

Once I had confessed my support for legalizing marijuana, things quickly got silly. She accused me of supporting a crime that is akin to raping and murdering people, and in response I told her she was being ridiculous. Which she was. I mean, whatever side of the marijuana debate you sit on, the fact remains that somebody ingesting a substance into their body in the privacy of their own home is a personal choice that impinges upon the freedom of noone else and harms noone else other than those who may care for the health and welfare of that person.

Feeling as though I was unable to get through to this woman, I tried to create some form of understanding that would bridge our worlds. So, recalling that we’d had a drink together, I suggested that alcohol is like marijuana, in that it’s a psychoactive substance that inhibits cognitive function and temporarily affects the biochemistry of the brain, resulting in various choices, thoughts and actions that might not ordinarily occur while not under the influence. The key difference, I explained, is that it’s convenient for her that alcohol isn’t a social pariah.

Alcohol is disturbingly socially acceptable considering it is indeed a narcotic that results in far greater social disturbance, pain, suffering, disease and death than marijuana and all of its hunger-inducing bad movie-watching propensities. I mean, if we were to designate the legality of narcotics based solely on their relative dangers to human health, alcohol would be far and away the most illegal, most hazardous substance one could obtain. The statistics alone bear out this unassailable fact. If recent memory serves, it wasn’t a marijuana-fuelled crowd of frenzied Canucks fans who trashed downtown Vancouver last summer.

Frankly, I don’t really care if people think alcohol is perfectly harmless and marijuana is the devil’s weed, but I do find it bizarre that one is socially acceptable and the other is character maligning. For instance, if I went on Twitter right now and said I was going to go and drink until I blacked out, I would like receive validation for my choice, an assumption I was exaggerating, and a few “been there, done that” replies. If, however, I announced I was going to smoke weed until I was baked, eat a bag of chips, and then pass out comfortably in my bed, I’d come off as a drug addict and an irresponsible human being.

One could argue that marijuana has broken through some of these social stigmatas, especially on the west coast, rendering such a comparison to lesser relevance. But even if we change the comparison from alcohol to cocaine, I still think the importance should be the placed in the responsibility of the user of the narcotic and not the narcotic itself. Allow me to further explain.

If we can agree that almost everything that can be ingested is inherently harmful to a person, including things you can buy in a grocery store like Nyquil and Advil, then what we’re left with is personal responsility and all that comes with accepting the consequences of that responsibility. Curiously, at this very moment there’s a lawsuit from smokers against Big Tobacco, suing the very companies who provided them with the freedom of choice to take something they knew was damaging to their health, despite it being legal.

Eating too much salt or sugar can be a health hazard. Consuming red meat or foods high in saturated and trans fats can be considered a health hazard. There are innumerable foods and drinks one can absorb that, given the body’s chemistry and fitness, can be fatal. Indeed, before science and technology and supermarkets, eating the wrong plant or mushroom would kill you, and serve as a warning to your tribe or people that it wasn’t good for you. So, it seems to me that anything an adult person consumes is based on requiring the proper education and moderation to handle it.

In that vein, a person can irresponsibly consume copious amounts of salt legally, resulting in very poor health and high blood pressure, while a responsible person can consume moderate amounts of cocaine illegally, and retain a relatively strong state of mental and physical health. Keep in mind this isn’t really even opinion, this is just a logical reasoning of how the human body absorbs chemicals and nutrients.

In my opinion, the person who is able to be a functional member of society whilst ingesting or imbibing an illegal substance is a more socially responsible individual than the person who is less able to function in our society because of the assorted health issues associated with the abuse of a legal substance. What it comes down to, I suppose, is a belief that people should be endowed with the rights and responsibilities of what goes into their own bodies, and what they do with their own bodies, whether we’re talking about drugs, suicide, abortion, or nutrition.

The only conclusion that I can come to as to why people would treat responsible users of illegal substances with disdain and scorn is that some people are inherently afraid of freedom of choice. They want to be told what is good and bad without putting that to a test of logic or reason. It’s easier to get angry at me for choosing the rational argument than it is to question the authority that is based on irrational and arbitrary control of substances. The irony here, which continues to evade our lawmakers and politicians, is that the forbidden fruit tends to generate even more interest than one that is freely available for the plucking.

It doesn’t take much effort to look around at countries and jurisdictions which have taken a non-punitive approach to drugs to see that decriminalization or even legalization does nothing to proliferate them. On the contrary, Portugal showed greater reduced rates of drug abuse and the associated violence and crime under decriminalization than its European neighbours which maintain a U.S. style vendetta against free will and choice.

I recall watching an interview with Prime Minister Stephen Harper a couple of years ago in which he opined that drugs are controlled by dangerous and violent criminals, before proceeding to explain that’s why they have to remain illegal. The illogic of concluding that something that isn’t regulated or controlled would somehow be safer for the population when left in the hands of criminals did not escape me. One needs to look no further than alcohol’s prohibition as an example of what happened when the government absolved itself of responsibility, and banned the substance thoughtlessly and carelessly. Criminals moved in and created a black market for the product.

I don’t write this as an advocate for drugs or alcohol, and although I’ve consumed both in my life, I don’t presently do so. But to me it comes down to an issue of choice and the likelihood that a person can responsibly use a substance. There are a great deal of prescription drugs, like OxyContin, which are considered too dangerous and addictive to outright legalize. The question then becomes one of assessing the social harm to pushing something into the underground economy where criminals have no moral responsibility to care for a drug user in the same way that a drug company does.

The answer to that question is probably something similar to the legality of alcohol. Drinking responsibly, not driving, and offering a socially acceptable and welcoming means of escaping alcohol abuse, are all way of curtailing a problem which, for reasons of legality, we do not apply to drugs. It seems to me that the solution to many of the drug problems that exist is to take greater control of illegal substances, decriminalize drug use, and offer a more holistic approach to drug abuse that encourages people to seek out help before they become the sort of violent offenders and drain on our medical system.