I enjoy being a municipal reporter. That’s because on a local level I think it’s probably the easiest way to practice unbiased journalism, particularly if you don’t even live in the community in which you report. That happens to be the case for me, so it certainly allows me to report on subjects that would nearly be impossible to become invested in or inappropriately attached.

I suspect the heat grows as you report for larger municipalities, like a Toronto or a Vancouver newspaper. And once you begin reporting provincially or federally, it’s got to be difficult to please all of the people all of the time. Eventually someone, somewhere is going to think your newspaper articles are written favouring one side.

Reporting in a community where you don’t live is pretty much the heart of journalism. You don’t really know the place as well as somebody who lives there. And that’s partly a good thing, since it allows you to stand back and look at things objectively. You don’t necessarily care if some gigantic event is going to change things for better or worse since it doesn’t affect you.

Similarly, journalism is about reporting on events and things that you only have a superficial understanding about. Today I might have to write about municipal taxes and tomorrow I might have to write about a musician touring through town.

I don’t own a house so I don’t really know much about municipal taxes, and there’s a high probability I’ve never listened to the music of the band, but with a little research and some interviews I can become an expert for a day. It’s enough to help people understand the basics and then leave them the prerogative to dig deeper.

This whole process works for me. Something is happening, I find out what it is, I ask experts what they think, I print the story. Nowhere in that process do I really need to worry about what I think, other than trying to evaluate where the balance of sides might exist in a dispute. For instance, a new commercial development will have supporters and opponents and it’s important to get both sides.

But if there’s one thing that I believe has affected me after one year in journalism, it is the attitude some people have with regards to what other people are allowed to do with their own property. It’s not that I’m “pro-development” so much as I feel the whole “NIMBY” attitude is frustrating to deal with. And what’s worse is that if you don’t share sympathy with the NIMBYists, then you get the sense that they feel you’re against them. When the truth is I don’t care.

For example, the municipality I report in receives a large number of development applications. Some of them are big developments that affect the whole community and I can understand why people have reservations and want to voice their opposition.

But many of them involve modest changes where the owner of some land wants to subdivide his property and build new homes. Other applications just ask for variances to their property to build another structure, like a secondary dwelling or a coach house in the back.

It irritates me when people actually believe they have the right to get upset about what somebody else does to their own house or property. I think it’s bad enough you need to get permits and pass environmental inspections to make changes to your own property, but when other people decide to butt in I just don’t get it.

What business is it of theirs? Why do homeowners have to worry about what other people think? Why do people care how many trees get cut down on a piece of land that doesn’t belong to them?

I think the concept of property rights and land ownership is now so weakened in Canada that we all honestly believe we have the right to block other people from doing whatever they want to do. And to make things worse, I often hear complaints about how a proposal will ruin the neighbourhood, when it sounds exactly like the one I’m living in.

It’s almost a denial of reality and acceptance of how the rest of the world lives. If people don’t want things to ever change maybe they should move to the great barrens of northern Canada. Then they’d have nobody to worry about, and nothing bad will ever happen to the surrounding landscape.

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?

Honestly, I’m not even paying attention. Most of this stuff is just created by the media hype. We basically started with about 1,000 complaints to Elections Canada, which is pretty standard for a country of our size, and when the media trumped up this non-story we wound up with roughly 36 times that number. I’m actually surprised it isn’t larger based on the sheer media attention.

No, I don’t care about robocalls. Do you expect me to? First of all, if you’re impressionable enough to have your opinion changed by a recorded message, perhaps you really shouldn’t be voting at all. Secondly, to quote Brian Griffin from Family Guy, “undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet.” If you haven’t figured out who you’re going to vote for by the time an election has been called you probably don’t really care about what’s going on in your country in the first place.

And why should you? Politics in Canada is woefully damaged, and mainly useless to participate. I mean, what’s the greater injustice here: some disenfranchised voter who listened to a robocall and wound up going to the wrong election centre? Or the millions of votes that count for nothing every single election, regardless of whether they get put into the proper ballot box or not?

I’ll tell you which one it is. It’s the uselessness of the First Past The Post electoral system that people seem to want to hold on to like a winning ticket at a pony track. It’s great if you win the money, but if you lose… well, you get nothing. Nice try, better luck next time. Your opinion? Doesn’t matter for the next four years. Tell someone who gives a damn.

The thing that sucks about that is it’s amplified for those voters who live in ridings that never change incumbents. Imagine being the Liberal voter in Ruraltown, Alberta? Buddy can vote Liberal every four years for 80 years and he’s basically contributing nothing to the democracy. His vote, his time, his opinions, are all completely and utterly worthless and meaningless. He may as well just stay home and save the planet the 4×8 sheet of ballot paper.

Same goes for the conservative voter in Hippietown, British Columbia. You may as well just buy granola, put on the flip flops and grab a front seat to the gay pride parade. You aren’t going to see a conservative MP now, or in your life time. You might as well be a Leafs fan. It aint happening, buddy, so just forget about it.

Why would either of these individuals vote? And yet, the moment something sensible is suggested that would encourage greater democratic participation and better reflect the actual political makeup of Canada, everybody votes it down in the referendum. Thanks a lot for that, by the way. Because of that, I haven’t voted since 2008 and I don’t plan to vote again any time soon.

You see, the funny thing about the last election is that the Conservative Party, which owns 53.9 per cent of the power in the House of Commons, only had approval from 39.62 per cent of the country. Which means a two-thirds majority wanted nothing to do with the party that holds a totality of power in the country. Does that make any sense at all?

But proportional representation is only a part of my rant. Imagine if my vote did count, even though it doesn’t, and my guy actually got elected. Then what? Well, the funny thing about the way our political system works is that although we don’t give a damn about proportional representation in elections, the House of Commons has seats based on population distribution throughout Canada. Which means, of course, that the Centre of the Multiverse, Ontario, has almost all the power it could ever want.

Problem in Port Moody, British Columbia? Yeah, we’ll get to you eventually. Don’t hold your breath. Problem in Ottawa, Ontario? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir. So, really, when you elect a local politician in British Columbia, you’re really only adding a block-voting partisan to follow in lock-step with what Ottawa, the Centre of the Multiverse, wants.

Don’t think so? Hm, what happened when Bill Casey decided to act for constituents instead of his party masters? Well, my memory isn’t perfect but I seem to recall something about a bus and somebody being thrown under it. Which I’m sure really inspires other politicians to represent their local constituents.

So, to recap: Our votes are wasted, and even when they’re not, our elected representatives don’t represent what is best for us. Do you think robocalls even matters? We’re talking about a number of people who were so statistically irrelevant that they wouldn’t even show up in a margin of error poll. Compare that to the millions of votes that are tossed in the garbage every single election because their guy didn’t come in first place.

Yeah, no thanks.

Mohammad Shafia, front left, Tooba Yahya, front right, and their son Hamed Shafia, back left, are escorted at the Frontenac County courthouse in Kingston, Ontario on Saturday, January 28, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

The Shafia murder trial has returned a verdict, and to no great surprise the jury has found Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. They now begin a long, and we hope a horrible, next part of their life behind bars.

Much has already been written about the Shafia honour killings, but the ugly argument about culture clash has barely been allowed to surface. Though media publish the facts of the case and invite commentary, they are quick to delete and close commenting when Canadians begin to express their feelings. In that way the truth remains largely hidden, and that’s not a good thing for Canada because we desperately need to discuss it.

What sort of people are we letting into Canada that would consider doing such a thing? Is this the sort of Canada we want in the future? And if not, why are we not doing more to stop these kinds of people from bringing their warped, twisted sense of morality with them?

A few people have said that these sorts of immigrants should leave their barbaric views at home where it belongs. But even that opinion is a relativist one. Why should the third world be subjected to this kind of misogynistic tyranny? Is it ok to murder your family members for honour provided you’re beyond the borders of Canada?

There’s an even more unsettling thought to this case. In the rare instances in which a Shafia-type family actually acts on their barbaric ideals, how many find more non-violent means to coerce their family members in complying with their dishonourable notions of honour? How many women are abused behind the smiling, glossy-coloured magazine faces depicting Canada’s multicultural mosaic?

What’s more disturbing than the fact that there are people who would do this to their own daughters, is that such people who harbour such views even want to live in Canada. One is reminded of our most infamous Canadian family of convenience, the Khadrs, who immigrated here in order to exploit our own freedoms and generosity and use it against us. The Shafias are little different than the Khadrs.

For unless you despise Canada, why would you act so contrary to its nature? Why would you even want to come to Canada, where women are free to choose their own mates and make their own decisions in life, unless you intend to somehow change it?

Nobody wants to stop and think about immigration and the shifting demographics for fear the discussion is inherently racist. We are rapidly shifting from a Christian nation of European descendants, to one that is populated by South Asians, North Africans and people from the Middle East. That is a fact that is objectively neither good nor bad. The question one should ask next is whether there are negative consequences to these changes, and if so, what are they?

Well, the most obvious one is staring us in the face. If there are Islamic zealots in our midst, is it likely that the sort of incidents like the Shafia murders would become more common as we invite immigrants from Islamic countries? Or is this merely an aberration in a statistical average in which most Muslims follow the spirit and the letter of the law?

Who knows? But what is clear is that these new cultures have, in certain parts of Canada, decided to make their customs welcome. There are examples of Muslim women creating women-only swimming classes and salons and classrooms. This segregation may have a superficially friendly explanation, but it demonstrates a disinclination to conform to Canadian customs and modern attitudes.

Some people don’t seem to care about how Canada changes, since our nation relies on immigration for population growth, and hence can only become the face of those we allow in. And if that means a new majority decides to make certain customs and traditions a Canadian staple, so be it. This would be not unlike the sort of attitude that led to entire streets in France becoming impromptu prayer mats five times a day. And if that’s the sort of Canada you want, then by all means let’s not have a discussion about any of this.

If, however, you prefer that the country retain the sorts of values inherited by our founding European, Christian forebears, it would behove us to have a frank talk about who’s arriving at Pearson International Airport every single day, and what they’re bringing with them.

By now many people are likely aware of the comments made by NDP leadership hopeful Thomas Mulcair about his pride in being a dual French and Canadian citizen, mainly because of the ensuing comments from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In his most classically irreverent “just visiting” manner possible, Harper indiscreetly took a shot at Mulcair by stating his Canadianness greatly exceeds that of Mulcair’s.

“Just to be clear, these cases have come up in the past, and obviously it’s for Mr. Mulcair to use his political judgment in this case. In my case, as I say, I’m very clear. I’m a Canadian and only a Canadian.”

On the surface it might seem innocent enough. He was asked a question by the media, who are wont to stir the pot whenever the opportunity arises, and the Conservative leader obliged to take the spoon and furiously stir. But as we’ve learned over the years that the highly intelligent Harper has been a politician in this country, nothing he says or does can really be described as innocent.

This is a man for whom the word “relax” has no meaning. Scarcely a year since winning a majority government in Ottawa, the Conservatives have been busy running attack ads on enemies who are largely powerless, frustrating them in the House of the Commons at every opportunity, and continuing to the fundraise, presumably in the hopes that when the next election comes along they can destroy all traces of political opposition in Canada.

Harper is a shrewd and remarkable man, for he’s able to play on divisive issues with unparalleled talent. He deftly turned aside support for Michael Ignatieff by preying on issues largely irrelevant to his competence. He suggested Ignatieff was too aloof, an erudite intellectual taken to long absences from Canada, a country he could hardly understand or have any love for.

And it worked, in part because it did bother Canadians to think that Ignatieff had spent so many years outside of Canada. There was a genuine agreement that he had returned to Canada not for public service, but to lead the country. While some would rightly say that’s a laudable thing, others would say it was presumptuous and elitist.

But let’s not lose sight of the issue here. Harper criticizes a great deal of things in Canada that he makes no real attempt to change. The best example of this might be the Senate. But he does this purely for political gain. So when he was asked for his opinion on Mulcair, realizing the man could become the next NDP leader presented the irresistible chance to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of Canadians, and the groundwork for a smear campaign at a later date.

Having said that, Harper doesn’t say or do something unless he’s relatively convinced it’s going to resonate with Canadians. And to tell truth, the fact Canada has dual citizenship allowances is something that bothers a lot of people. Note that Harper would never seek to challenge the law itself, removing the right to hold two citizenships, since that doesn’t serve his political aims.

At the heart of every citizen of a country is a patriot, and we like to believe we love our country. Those Canadians who immigrated here from other countries were never forced to give up their old loyalties and swear allegiance to one land. Some believe that’s a strength, but I think many people, the people who might vote for Stephen Harper, find it a little bothersome. Not so much for the ordinary citizen, since our country is made up of many naturalized citizens, but for those who would lead us and speak for us.

There’s a reason that a rule exists that the President of the United States must be born on American soil to serve in office. It’s because people believe that loyalties can be divided, particularly if a person was born and grew up in another country. The idea that the leader serves only one people is a comforting one.

But even that isn’t the point of the Harper-Mulcair milieu. Stephen Harper isn’t Canadian by choice as he suggests. He was born here, just as I was, and so naturally he’s a Canadian and only a Canadian. What else could he possibly be? It’s meaningless for Harper to state an obvious fact. It would be more impressive if he had been born in Kenya and then renounced his Kenyan citizenship and stated his one true loyalty is Canada.

For Mulcair, there’s no genuine fear that his loyalties are divided. The term “Canadian of convenience” doesn’t apply to him. It applies to those citizens who might live abroad, but still return to Canada once in a while to keep their affairs in order, perhaps take advantage of health care or some other universal service. Or the ones who become Canadian suddenly when their country is besieged by war or natural disaster. Then they become Canadians in a hurry.

If anything, Mulcair is a Frenchman of convenience, becoming a dual citizen for the same reason many Canadians do. They keep some of the perks and benefits of membership. Hey, if you could get a free passport to the United Kingdom, wouldn’t you take one?

In the end, both politicians were just playing politics. Mulcair was appealing to his multicultural NDP base, while Harper was appealing to his. And citizens, dual citizens or otherwise shouldn’t really care one way or another.

An article in the National Post today highlights an issue in North America that grows larger by the day. It’s called sex-selective abortion, or otherwise known as gendercide, one of the reasons that large portions of Asia are imbalancing the natural male to female ratio by killing female fetuses. And the immigrants from countries that practice this atrocity constitute the two largest ethnic groups coming here: Chinese and Indians.

We’ve known about gendercide for a while now, but largely ignored it because the practice was being done outside of Canada. Things that happen beyond our borders bother us less than when they happen in our own backyard. But the idea that Asians are coming here to perform sex-specific abortions isn’t just something that can be ignored. Particularly when it begins to affect us because of our need and craven desire to treat all cultures equally.

Canadians, as much as we are changing each and every year, have traditionally had no history of sex-selective abortion. When technology came along that enabled us to determine the sex of a fetus, we accepted the technology as a boon to society, not as a tool to end the life of girls. And while it can be said that abortion has a solid history of practice in Canada, it has never been due to cultural hangups about the relative value of women in our society.

The concept of murdering women is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting female fetuses. It should make us feel the same revulsion we have for the Taliban murdering girls or enslaving them behind shrouds. Gendercide could very well be the 2010′s version of the outcry of gender apartheid a decade ago in Afghanistan and other parts of the world that do not accept the concept of egalitarianism.

But what I cannot accept is a notion that all Canadians should be treated with the same sort of inherent mistrust when it comes to ultrasounds. We’ve already been through this with terrorism. Where one specific demographic has had a prolific history of terrorism, we have taken to suspecting the 99.99 per cent of Canadians who are not terrorists. The lengths to which we have been inconvenienced in order to provide a preposterous appearance of not racially profiling has resulted in the most inefficient, intrusive and invasive way of travelling possible.

Similarly, a large percentage of Canadians have no chance of being sex-selective abortionists. However, it’s fair to say that this percentage changes on a daily basis as thousands of new Asian immigrants come to North America every single day, some of them harbouring backwards cultural hangups that are incompatible with our own culture. It is within the identified demographics from the article of people from India, China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines that we should be looking to target this problem.

There’s nothing racist or discriminatory about this. There is no rational reason for refusing to tell Canadians who are not of Asian descent the sex of the fetus since it’s reasonable to expect the fetus isn’t in danger. A blanket ban on all Canadian women is the same useless and failed approach used against terrorism, and all it’s going to do is piss everybody off.

There may be another way. Perhaps when a parent is apprised of the sex of a fetus, that doctor is legally obliged to inform abortion clinics of the decision with the name of the mother. Or perhaps a mother could sign a legal document swearing they will not abort the child after learning the sex. Although based on Canada’s nebulous abortion laws, or lack thereof, I could foresee the clinic going ahead with the abortion anyway. After all, these places are designed to put the woman’s choice ahead of all other issues, even if that choice is culturally reinforced by a patriarchal society that dominates and subjugates women.

Regardless of how it’s achieved, the idea that “policy would require the understanding and willingness of women of all ethnicities” is insulting to the vast majority of ethnicities that don’t practice this barbarism. In the same way that the politically correct are careful not to offend anybody by painting too broadly with the same broad brush, it’s extremely offensive to be equally suspected of wanting to abort your child for cultural issues that aren’t your own.

Ironically, although this issue is less about abortion itself and more about cultural gendercide, social conservatives might find themselves tempted to support a politically correct blanket ban until seven months, knowing that the greater goal of preventing as many abortions as possible is more important than the inconvenience it might serve to non-Asians.

But that sort of thinking has to be rejected. No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, the more morally repugnant act is surely the selection of an entire gender for eradication. This is a disgusting, offensive extermination of girls in the womb based on the belief that boys are more valuable in a society than girls. It must be stopped, and that cannot happen by simply closing our eyes and treating the problem as a generic one like the common cold.

An image the CBC isn’t likely to show you. Omar Khadr during his younger, more happy days as a terrorist apprentice building IEDs to kill and main people.
Photo: U.S. DEFENCE OPERATIONS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

I can’t think of anything more appropriate to sum up this slobbering suckupfest to the life and times of a murderer, terrorist and a war criminal, than the following screenshot:

Whatever truth that the commenter imparted to gain the “thumbs up” from the 76 per cent of people who voted was apparently not truthful enough for the CBC, who not only deleted the comment, but appears to have deleted all and any comments that were approved of by the majority of the readers. Because you know what they say at the CBC, the customer is always wrong.

These, apparently, were allowed to stay. Probably because they reaffirm the main basis of truth the CBC operates under, which is that Canada is inhabited by a land of racists:

Well, uh, you see, Neoriel, the reason this young man is being villified, as it were, is that he’s an admitted murderer, a terrorist and a war criminal. Glad I could clear that up for you.

I figured I’d said enough about Keynesian economics in the last blog entry, but a train of thought has since been weaving through my brain, and so I should probably let it out.

It isn’t just that the idea of spending money to stave off recessions are a contemporary madness, or that politicians manipulate them in order to avoid becoming unpopular during the inevitable ebb and flow of market forces. Nor is it that Keynesian economics always leaves us farther behind than we were before, necessitating larger and larger government assistance programs and funds to bring us back out of our deeper holes. No, it’s much worse than that.

I heard on the radio today that every conceivable cost of living will be going up again this year at a greater rate than inflation. How we’re expected to pay for it is beyond me. Everything from payroll employment insurance and pension plan taxes to the perpetually pointless carbon tax to car insurance premiums, home heating costs and of course health insurance “premiums”. That lie your parents told you about health care being free in this country isn’t true any more than it is when Occupy Wall Street activists tell Americans how great we have it up here.

No, what’s worse than Keynesian economics is the political disease that necessitates it, a contemporaneous concept borne in the early part of the twentieth century in conjunction with, and that’s no coincidence, the mass media. That political disease is the concept that the government is somehow responsible for your perpetual well-being, care, consideration, welfare, concern and overall happiness. And in so pursuing this impossibly utopian mandate, every single politician has failed to manage it.

What requires a city, a province or a country to mindlessly devalue a currency, spend beyond its fiscally allotted means, irresponsibly raise taxes beyond sustainable levels and meddle in the free market? Why, the politician’s promise of course. Why else would we need to waste $300 billion a year on things nobody needed in 1867 when Canada was a fledgling nation of the British empire? To make Canadians happy, of course.

And how does one make Canadians happy? To attend their every possible need. That means going beyond just the basics of health care, education and law and order, but of course the creation of heritage, economic development, government regulatory boards and bodies, each with their own taxes and fees on top of their per-use service costs.

It isn’t, nor should it ever have been, the job of a politician to create a job for a free citizen of Canada. And at one point in the existence of my family’s habitation in Canada, it wasn’t. Lose your job? Well, you better sweep a chimney, dig a ditch, or shovel behind a horse, or else you and your family would, in short order, be occupying a tent outside, and it didn’t come with a safe injection nurse and a library either.

People who complain about the government not keeping its election promises about employment opportunities and an inability to find work in their field are perhaps the finest idiots this side of the historical record of Christopher Columbus. Do they not realize we are the descendants of people who not only left their homes in England, Scotland and France to find work, they spent two weeks on an ocean voyage for the opportunity to inhabit a barren wasteland? People who can’t be bothered to search more than 10 minutes from their home for a job outside their degree in psychology so they can collect 11 months of employment insurance, are the very reason for the problems we experience.

In the natural order of things, and one can agree upon this whether one believes in Darwin’s theory or not, the fittest survive while the weak are cast off from the earth. Unfortunately, humans are far too civilized to adhere to this basic philosophical truth. We embrace the idea of protecting and nourishing the weak, building entire civilizations around limiting ourselves to how much we can achieve with the burden of millions of people who aren’t helping. And not only are they not helping, they’re literally standing there watching us while they’re not helping, and blaming us for being such daft boors for trying to get things accomplished.

In feudal times it used to be a good job if one could win a spot in the sovereign’s household, wiping mouths and cleaning toilets from sunrise to sunset for some bread and water long enough to keep one’s head from being chopped off on a wooden block. Now, not only do we have a lifestyle so luxurious, so comfortable and utterly free of care, that we have to invent reasons to complain about it. I can’t find a job… that pays me enough to buy the flat screen TV I want. I can’t afford groceries… with mint chocolate chip ice cream. Aye, but you do make sure your iPhone is fully charged, eh?

Sometimes the absurdity of it all just gets to me. We’re in another financial crisis of our manufacture, and everyone is once again contemplating how the politicians of the globe should fix it. Well, one possible solution would be for them not to fix it. That fixing it has been the problem for a long time, and that by not fixing it, it might very well fix itself. After all, the government doesn’t create jobs, it just takes the credit for them.

The raison d’etre of today’s government is to find reasons it should exist. As Stephen Taylor once wrote about scrapping the long-form census, if the government doesn’t know how many Urdu-speaking disabled taxi cab drivers there are in Ottawa, it cannot create policies, programs and government departments dedicated to helping Urdu-speaking disabled taxi cab drivers in Ottawa. The absence of such a program is a benefit to every Canadian.

If we all found more reasons why government shouldn’t exist, instead of why it should, we shouldn’t have a need for a $300 billion annual budget in Ottawa, nor the donation of half our earned income toward that purpose. We shouldn’t need 330 politicians in the House of Commons hemming and hawing about jobs and employment insurance and whether, Mr. Speaker, the honourable member for Thornhill is a piece of excrement for blocking taxpayer-funded trips to Durban to speculate about invisible gasses making us all hot and bothered.

And we certainly shouldn’t need to ask those politicians to come up with solutions that have been self-evident to every creature that emerged from egg or womb since time immemorial.

UPDATE

By the by, writing this reminded me of Kate McMillan’s National Post column from 2008, now disappeared by the Posts’ unreliable archives, but saved by Kate herself. Have a read.

If China were some irrelevant Middle Eastern country we use solely to jump into Afghanistan we might have a few choice words for the kind of human rights abuses and wanton subversion of democracy and liberty that marks a regular day in the communist country. But it isn’t, and we don’t. For the most part we shut up and thank them for stamping out our plastic trinkets and tell them to keep up the good work.

It’s a sham. Or as Terry Glavin puts it, “It’s a rigged game. Canada is an open society, with an open economy. China is neither.”

Fully half of China’s billion citizens subsist on sub-Saharan incomes of less than $2 a day, and they’re growing increasingly impatient with the corruption, oppression and persecution that has accompanied the stuffing of Beijing’s foreign-reserves treasury.
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Last January, Beijing’s state-controlled China Investment Corporation rewarded Ottawa’s obsequiousness by choosing Toronto for its first overseas office. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was so happy he nearly wet his trousers.
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It’s gotten to the point that not a single politician in Ottawa will muster the impudence to wonder aloud whether, just maybe, this charade has gone on long enough.

The problem is that the global economy is largely dependent on continuing this charade for as long as possible, for while the eurozone remains Ground Zero in the debt crisis, China’s economic slowdown spells certain recession for the world in 2012.

So, we’ll have to hold our indignation just a while longer. Meanwhile, the United States will have to hope China doesn’t call in all that debt it’s been buying up over the past few years.

Courtesy the masterful Mark Steyn:

Alas, our somnolent youth are also laboring under the misapprehension that advanced Western societies still have somebody to stick it to. The total combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans is $1.5 trillion. So, if you confiscated the lot, it would barely cover one Obama debt-ceiling increase. Nevertheless, America’s student princes’ main demand was that someone else should pick up the six-figure tab for their leisurely half-decade varsity of Social Justice studies.

Steyn makes a cute comment about Canada in the piece as well, pointing out that the keystone pipeline delivering Canadian crude from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on “no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers.”

To rephrase for Canadian readers: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or province, or municipality?