National Post alumnus Paul “Bad Boy” Wells has some intriguing, almost conservative, thoughts:

…Today’s competitive landscape leaves room for a paper that would be less frantic than its competitors, especially the poor, lost Globe. Its front page would try less desperately to be liked by everyone. Such a paper would realize a newspaper isn’t going to look like the internet and shouldn’t try — just as William Thorsell realized in 1990, when he edited the Globe, that newspapers’ attempts to look like television were simply making them look needy. It would cover news according to its own sense of what matters, not its fears about what the reader doesn’t have time for. Those are broad criteria but somewhere within them is a paper, different from today’s Post, that would also be distinct from the rest.

As for “Canada’s National…”:

The Canadian Forces’ future, or, why the Globe and Mail is not a newspaper

No sink or swim, or, the Starification of the Globe

Mark
Ottawa

I think that I, along with a lot of other people, had a lot more confidence that Jason Kenney was going to come away from his Australian fact-finding mission with a little more bread and butter than the limp offering he’s dishing up:

The federal government has come up with a plan to deal with “mass arrivals” of asylum seekers from places like Sri Lanka, the country of origin for 492 people who arrived here last month on a barely seaworthy vessel. The “tough new rules” to deter human smugglers are based on designating a new class of asylum seeker in order to differentiate between a single claimant and the mass arrivals.

So what do these new hard-hitting rules entail? What sort of sweeping changes have been made to deter these human smugglers from crash-landing in the ports of British Columbia with boatloads of would-be beneficiaries of Canadian health care and welfare?

Read the National Post to find out.

It’s no great secret that I’m not a fan of Stephen Harper’s economic policies. Although I don’t mention it in the following piece, the Fraser Institute’s Niels Veldhuis proved that the stimulus plan accomplished negligible economic growth in Canada during the recession. We know that stimulus doesn’t work. We know that massive government spending is a liberal principle. We know that Stephen Harper’s capitulation on the issue was blatant expedience.

That’s why my piece in the National Post pulls no punches whatsoever:

Let it be dubbed the “blue sweater vest tour”.

Stephen Harper is planning a painfully transparent attempt to generate the kind of publicity that Michael Ignatieff did with his “Liberal Express”, by embarking on a “pan-Canadian” consultation with people on the much-vaunted second phase of the economic action plan.

You know the one I’m talking about, right? The action plan that didn’t actually accomplish any economic action, short of stimulating the sign-making industry. The Canadian Press reported last week that civil servants across Canada were obliged by the Privy Council Office to ensure every single project engaging in stimulus spending had a big sign advertising the fact. The 8,500 signs, ranging in cost from $86 to $663 each, all display the stimulus action plan logo devised by the Conservative government in 2009.

Read more…

I don’t know about you, but I’m genuinely amazed that Gordon Campbell hasn’t either stepped down, or been given the boot by his party. I explore this issue, and the HST, in my latest National Post entry:

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

The above quote may be from the pages of science fiction novelist, Robert A. Heinlein, in his 1966 story about a lunar colony’s revolt against the Earth. But the truth of the statement could not be more relevant to the situation facing the Liberal government in the province of British Columbia today.

Premier Gordon Campbell has said repeatedly that he believes the Harmonized Sales Tax [HST] is what is the best thing for the people of the province that he leads. In fact, he said as much as recently as Sunday afternoon, in a rally at Fort Langley-Aldergrove MLA Rich Coleman’s annual barbeque, attended by Liberal Party members and volunteers.

Read the whole thing…

I don’t have a lot of time to write a preamble before I rush off to school but after reading about all the leaders of political parties [like M.Ignatieff] and countries condemning the book burning after their long silence on the Mosque at Ground Zero, I had to write this. Feel free to critique:

The Reverend Terry Jones may have backed away from his plan to have a book burning of the holy Koran on 9/11 (emphasis on may,) but the fire started by the proposed plan is far from being quenched. The preacher called off the burning on Thursday, after claiming he had come to an agreement with Muslim leaders over moving the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” farther away from the site where Islamic terrorists murdered 2,606 people nine years ago [as of the time of this writing, Islamic leaders deny any such agreement exists with the Rev. Jones].

The proposals — the ground zero mosque and the plan to burn the Koran — produced a global backlash from both sides, but the most vociferous response has been the side pleading not to burn the Koran.

Read it all at the National Post…

Though admittedly a silly word, it aptly describes a silly form of argumentation. And now the New York Times vocabulary blog, which features a “miscellany of modern words and phrases”, has acknowledged the birth of “yesbuttery”:

Portmanteau term denoting agreement tempered by a contrary view.

Criticising the view that Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan has inspired homegrown terrorism, Adrian MacNair wrote for The National Post:

There is something altogether insincere about condemning terrorism on the one hand, and then rationalizing it on the other. It is a form of “yesbuttery,” a term coined by an unknown author which describes the “troops out” crowd who believe that Afghanistan would be better off on its own, despite the brutal bloodshed of Taliban retribution that would ensue.

Naturally, I acknowledge no original ownership of the term, as quoted in the Times. Indeed I heard it first from Terry Glavin, who has created his own share of Fotheringhamisms.

As soon as I learned of the news that the B.C. Finance Ministry had known about details of the HST months before the 2009 election, I knew I had to write about it. This sordid saga has been dragging on for over a year now, and now it seems the Campbell government has nowhere left to hide but in the depths of childlike fairytale excuses that are at once unbelievable, as well as grossly insulting to the intelligence:

Piece by piece, the shroud of deceit that covers the truth surrounding the background dealings of the Harmonized Sales Tax in British Columbia is falling away from the B.C Liberal government. On Wednesday reports revealed that weeks before the 2009 B.C. election campaign in British Columbia even got underway, senior officials in the B.C. Finance Ministry were apprised of confidential details about the HST deal Ontario secured with Ottawa.

That deal included the lump cash payment and flexibility that sweetened the pot to such an extent that B.C. Finance Minister Colin Hansen said it convinced the government to go ahead and co-operate with Ottawa. The only problem is that Mr. Hansen said last year that the details of the HST were never discussed with the federal government until after the election, a statement he maintains to this very day.

Read the whole thing at the National Post…

I’ve been negligent in my National Post writing obligations of late. I decided to correct that when I read the stupendously misguided attempt at an op-ed by the Toronto Star’s most notorious apologist for Islam doing naughty things, Haroon Siddiqui. As mentioned in the post before this one by Mark Collins, my column was followed up by Terry Glavin’s tying of the loose ends, so to speak. Do read both. Here’s a snippet of mine:

It is not surprising to see that the reaction in the Toronto Star to the recent arrests pertaining to alleged “homegrown” Canadian terrorism is one of cautious skepticism. Though we must always remain fair in allowing the legal system to ascertain the guilt or innocence of the accused, it is another thing altogether to rationalize terrorism as the manifested effect of the cause of Western aggression.

But that is precisely what Toronto Star op-ed writer Haroon Siddiqui does almost every time there is a report of homegrown terrorism. His latest missive, an equivocation of a magnitude rarely seen in print, attempts to mask his contempt for the Afghan mission as a sort of rebuke of Canadian journalistic integrity. We have not answered the five Ws, he explains, the most important being the “why.”

Read the whole thing at the National Post…

The Globe and Mail ran an interesting article on Friday comparing questions on the mandatory long-form census to information extracted under torture or duress. Lawrie McFarlane, former deputy health minister in Saskatchewan, told a Parliamentary committee that Canadians lie on the census, citing 21,000 Canadians who registered as “Jedi” for their religion in the 2001 census.

Mr.McFarlane said that Canadians are prone to lie about questions they find uncomfortable, since they don’t want to be found in non-compliance of the mandatory census form:

“What you can guarantee by compulsion is a response: You put a gun to somebody’s head, they’re going to say something.

“It’s almost like the argument for water boarding: if you water board enough people, they will tell you something.

“The question is are they telling you something that’s reliable? Are they telling you something that’s usable?”

I think this is the best point made about the long-form census yet. Although one has to swear an oath that the answers one gives on the mandatory census are accurate, one can make the assumption that some of the information is unreliable because that information has been extracted through coercion.

Most intelligence experts agree that torture works in a similar way; not wanting to displease their captors, a person being subjected to torture will give the kind of answers they think want to be heard, rather than refuse to answer and potentially be given more pain. But that information is seldom useful. Unlike the television show “24 hours”, which depicted the usefulness of extracting vital information to save a city, most coercive testimony provides useless intelligence.

There’s something particularly offensive about being required by law to submit 40 pages of personal information to the government under penalty of fine or imprisonment. It could arguably lead some people to provide not just faulty information, but outright untruths, skewing and distorting the value of the data set.

But the census issue has been stirred up to deliver much political fodder. So much so that the opposition Liberal party intends to launch a private-members bill in the fall in order to reverse the changes made by the governing Conservative Party. The bill is unlikely to pass, so the reason behind the move is nothing more than political window dressing.

Curiously, the parliamentary committee also called to the stand popular Calgary radio talk show host, Dave Rutherford, who has been one of the few people to openly call the census controversy a contrivance of the media. His testimony here is classic:

“I am here because I have expressed an opinion which is in support of the government’s action [but] I don’t want to be considered a cheerleader for the government.

“I agree with the democratic process in this country … and because I participate in democracy, I am here. But other than that, I don’t know why I am here.”

He is there primarily because the opposition parties have tried to pigeonhole the census issue into one of an essential government service under attack by ideologues. Without an intrusive 40-page form, the statisticians argue that the government won’t be able to provide the level of services Canadians are accustomed to. And perhaps that’s the best reason of all to oppose the mandatory long-form census. As Stephen Taylor wrote in the National Post, the dismantling of the Canadian welfare state begins by removing the ability to measure the special interest groups they pander to. Good public policy should be good for all Canadian citizens.

I was rather surprised at how this article went over on the National Post website. As in, it didn’t. For whatever reason, some people misunderstood the purpose of my article as some kind of defence of the Tamils. It isn’t. I was merely saying that you can’t blame people for trying to get into Canada, if its open borders beckon so tantalizingly. The onus isn’t on the Tamils to keep away, but on us to tighten our borders.

Look, I wanted a rational discussion of the Tamil issue for once, and I felt that people were either arguing that its the fault of the Tamils or the fault of an uncaring public. It is neither. Canadians do care and want to help refugees, but they most certainly do not want to be taken advantage of.

But why don’t I let you read the article first?

When it comes to the recent controversy of the 492 Tamil migrants who arrived by ship in Canada with the hopes of claiming political asylum here, opinion is very divided. According to a new survey released by Angus Reid, 63% of Canadians feel the ship should have been prevented from landing in British Columbia, and a great deal of those polled expressed skepticism that the Tamils aboard were fleeing any danger at all.

Even more respondents, 83%, said they felt that the Tamils are jumping the proper immigration queue, and that they should be forced to apply through the same channels as any other immigrant.

[...]

Read the whole thing at the National Post…