Further to the Upperdate at this post,

Why we need F-35s, or, do the Russians have a radar that can reach Cold Lake?/Nuclear Voodoo Update thought/Boys in blue ties Upperdate

the government sure keeps trying to get those votes in Québec:

Deal keeps Mirabel firm aloft
$468-million accord with fees Contract to maintain CF-18 fighter jets would save 500 jobs, L-3 MAS says

L-3 MAS (Canada) Inc. of Mirabel pocketed a $468-million cheque from Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday for the last contract to maintain Canada’s aging fleet of 78 CF-18 fighter jets.

The deal runs to 2017, with possible extensions to 2020 that would add $86 million to the contract’s value and maintain 500 jobs at L-3 MAS’s Mirabel plant.

After the elaborate photo op and announcement ceremony -at which Harper answered briefly to only five questions -L-3 MAS president Sylvain Bedard told reporters that without the agreement, his company would have had to fire 500 employees…

But the bigger prize by far still eludes L-3 MAS, the Canadian subsidiary of New York City-based L-3 Communications, a major global provider of aircraft maintenance and modernization services.

That would be a deal to service the CF-18′s successor, the 65 Joint Strike Fighter CF-35s the federal government recently agreed to buy from Lockheed Martin for $9 billion. The maintenance and servicing clause of that deal is worth another $7 billion.

In a brief interview, National Defence Minister Peter Mackay said L-3 MAS “certainly has the inside track (to snag the CF-35 deal), especially after the job they’ve done (on the CF-18) all these years.”

“The great thing is that they would be in line not just for the 65 (CF-35s), but possibly for other armed forces as well. I mean, (Lockheed Martin) sold 3,000 of those things.”..

Via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

I mean, those jet fuel fumes really are getting to poor Peter’s brain if he thinks other countries are going to give up their own pork to have their F-35s maintained in Canada Québec. And if he believes Lockheed Martin has actually sold 3,000 F-35s he’s truly in cloud cukoo land; he might do well to read this post:

Fighter sales prospects

Plus the “…F-35 fact check Update” here.

Update: More Conservative pork-o-mania here and here, via John Robson.  Dig the audio of his weekly Friday morning interview at CFRA Ottawa this morning, today on the nth resurrection of the Palestinian peace “process”, Iraq, Afstan, health care run by central planning–plus the federal government’s seeming insatiable propensity for pushing pork.  Mr Robson is a rare Canadian who can speak with real knowledge, fierce intelligence, and wicked wit.

Upperdate: I won’t link to this Ottawa Citizen story,

Russian planes don’t often fly into Canadian territory: Documents

since the only “expert” it quotes is St. Steve Staples.

Mark
Ottawa

…no wonder so many Québécois hardly feel Canadian. William Johnson elucidates:

The Bloc’s silent partner
The Quebec Liberal Party is complicit in separatism’s continued appeal to Quebeckers

…
Anyone who doubts this symbiotic relationship need only consult the QLP’s website. There, the Liberals explain the eight values that define their party: individual freedoms, identification with Quebec, economic development, social justice, respect for civil society, democracy a hallmark of political action, intergenerational equity, and ties to Canada.

So one might expect a celebration of federalism as a fundamental value that distinguishes the QLP from the separatists, not to mention an appreciation of Quebec’s participation in Canada, the country recognized as among the most socially developed on Earth. But there’s not a single word of praise for Canada or federalism in the 2,260-word essay. Nowhere is Canada recognized as the country of Quebeckers.

The section Ties to Canada deals exclusively with the QLP’s conflicts with the Canadian government. Here are examples of the party’s boasts: “In 1970 [really in 1971], under Robert Bourassa, it refused to endorse the Victoria Charter because it did not respond to the proposals put forward by Quebec concerning the division of jurisdiction in areas of social policy. … In 1997, it opposed the reference to the Supreme Court by Ottawa on secession, arguing that the constitutional future of Quebec was above all a political question that must be resolved in Quebec. In 1998, it opposed Bill C-20 [the Clarity Act], which imposed on Quebec rules that excessively restrained the province in the area of constitutional referendums.”

In other words, the QLP asserts the right to secede unilaterally from Canada. The Supreme Court be damned when it finds otherwise…

Earlier on the same theme (with a gracious nod to Judicious Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe):

Between the RoC and the hard place

Mark
Ottawa

Publius has at the great federal cash cow rip-off:

Most of Canadian politics can be explained by one word: Quebec.

Equalization is supposed to allow the six recipient provinces to provide “comparable services” to the four donor provinces.

But Quebec, which received $8.3 billion or 60% of all equalization transfers in the last fiscal year, provides services as a have-not province that are nowhere available among the haves…

Quebec is a have-not province in the sense that a psychosomatic is sick. From time to time members of the mainstream media ask, genuinely perplexed, why some in Alberta want to separate. The above is the answer…

Whatever the well intentioned rhetoric at the start of the Equalization program, in practice it has become a colossal bribe to keep Quebec in Canada, and the Atlantic provinces voting for the government of the day…

To break Equalization would mean breaking the culture of dependency across much of this country. It would be a dramatic victory for freedom in Canada…Any politician who would dare challenge the Cult of Equalization would face a barrage ten times worse than Tony Clement now faces. Stephen Harper, we can be sure, doesn’t have that kind of guts.

One does rather long for the Conservatives of January 2006:

Why not let the provinces look after their constitutional responsibilities?

The Globe editorializes today: (full text not online)

At its most radical, it [the Conservatives' platform] could mean the elimination of enourmous portions of federal spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction such as health care coupled with parallel moves moves to reduce federal taxes. That would allow the provinces to raise their taxes by many billions of dollars. They would then be able to spend the funds as they wished, implicitly [surely explicitly] edging Ottawa out of much of its role in the nation’s social skein. That would be an unacceptable loss…

Why is the Globe obsessed with an overweaning federal government trying to control things not its constitutional responsibility, moreover things it does not know how to administer? What is wrong with the provinces having enough money, raised themselves, to do what they are supposed to do, and directly accountable to their electorates for success or failure?

A newly-elected Quebec Conservative, on the other hand, seems to have the right idea.

Maxime Bernier, elected Monday in the riding of Beauce, south of Quebec City, says the new government will look at transferring taxation powers to the provinces, at the expense of the federal government. “There are many possibilities,” he said. “Transfers to provinces. Tax points to provinces. The money in the federal government’s surplus could be transferred to the provinces.

“Or the surplus could be put back into Canadians’ pockets by reducing taxes, so that provinces would then have more taxation room, to get the sums they need from the pockets of Canadians.”

Mr. Bernier said the Conservative government will bring a breath of fresh air to federalism in Canada, “with provinces that are autonomous and a federal government that is autonomous in its field of jurisdiction.”..

There’s still something to said for Minimum Max:

That was a remarkable speech Maxime Bernier delivered the other day [Jan. 21, 2010] in Calgary. That is, it was an entirely unremarkable speech, the kind you would hear every other day in any normal democracy: a fairly pedestrian restatement of conservative principles by a leading conservative politician.

But in the Conservative Party of Canada, in its present moribund state, it counts as Luther’s 95 Theses. It must surely rule out any return to cabinet, if it does not lead to his outright expulsion from caucus, since it contradicts every line of current Conservative — well, I was going to say “policy,” but that’s not quite right, is it? Policy, after all, tends to proceed from some sort of underlying ideas or philosophy, and as we know today’s Conservatives have worked very hard to expunge those from their thoughts. Say “positioning,” then.

But back to Bernier. Consider, in particular, this passage:

One way to change the terms of the debate would be to announce that the government is not going to grow any more…

Also today, on a similar theme:

Pneus ABC Tires Inc: Your tax dollars at work…

Canadians are addicted to being bribed by governments; governments are hooked on buying votes. In the end nothing but a Ponzi scheme.

Mark
Ottawa

Maybe, as Spector Vision sees it, the…

CMA speaks with forked tongue

Perusing my morning read, I see that the CMA is out with a new report that is quite critical of our existing health care system. And that the organization is calling “for five major changes to help improve the state of the system, and the health of Canadians.”

How to pay for all this? — you may ask yourself. As a former federal and provincial public servant, I certainly asked that question after reading the Globe article — not to speak of the big, honking headline on the front page of the Star...

…you’d think that the medical profession might have some thoughts to offer Canadians as we make that decision.

Indeed, turning to the CMA report itself, I find that the CMA actually salutes the recent Québec budget:

“Quebec has been the first among the provinces and territories to acknowledge that the current approach to funding health care is neither sustainable in the long term nor fair to future generations…”

One of the favourite dodges of politicians in our country is to say one thing in English and another in French. However, if we can’t count on doctors to give us the straight goods when it comes to health care, on whom can we count?

Earlier, in my province:

The joys of one-tier health care, Ontario style

Mark
Ottawa

It’s juxtaposin’ time again:

Washington Post:

British government moves to dramatically cut public funding for the arts

Toronto Sun

Fed dollars will stay in terror play production

One almost longs for the revelation of that hidden agenda. But then there is the Québécois chimera.  As for that chimera, the Globe and Mail’s oh so judicious Jeffrey Simpson once in a while shows a bolder and more, er, insightful side:

Why do we bother with them?

Mark
Ottawa

Our government might be more careful about the separatists it supports:

What the Kosovo ruling means for Canada: trouble
The true impact of the World Court’s decision will be on separatist groups outside of Serbia that now have a model for how to declare independence

…International lawyers agree that last week’s decision is mostly notable for what it doesn’t do. The World Court purposely sidestepped difficult questions such as whether the declaration brought about Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and whether nations such as Canada and the United States were legally justified in recognizing an independent Kosovo. The court ruled only that declarations of independence made by separatist groups are not contrary to international law…

… if Canada were to criticize Quebec for failing to adhere to the Clarity Act, Quebec could point out that Kosovo never even held a referendum in advance of declaring its independence. Its leaders could ask: Why must we not only hold a referendum but also allow the House of Commons to approve the referendum question and certify that the referendum result constituted a clear vote for independence?

The Kosovo precedent also undermines the notion that Quebec must seriously negotiate its separation from Canada…

The Harper government’s unconditional recognition of Kosovo has left Canada in an extremely difficult position. Whereas other countries that face secessionist threats and have refused to recognize Kosovo can maintain – consistent with the World Court’s decision – that a unilateral declaration of independence does not have the effect of creating an independent state, Canada must somehow reconcile its acceptance of Kosovo’s secession based on such a declaration with its claim that a similar action by Quebec would be contrary to international law.

After the court’s Kosovo decision, it is naive to believe that the Clarity Act will prevent Quebec from unilaterally declaring its independence from Canada…

…Canada should also be more prudent in recognizing independence movements in the future. As noble as it may be to support the desire of other peoples for self-determination, Canada should not again needlessly weaken its position with respect to Quebec.

Milan Markovic, a New York-based lawyer, is a teaching fellow at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia.

Some other thoughts in a February 2008 post at Daimnation!:

…
There’s a lot of hypocrisy here amongst those Europeans and Canadians who required a UN Security Council mandate for the Iraq war, but who now support UDI by Kosovo–a territory until now managed under a UNSC mandate–without the requisite UNSC authorization. I see no overwhelmingly important reasons of national interest on any country’s part to justify support for, and recognition of, UDI at this time. Most just feel sheer boredom with the continuation of the problem combined with some sort of remnant well-intentioned, warm and fuzzy, Wilsonian support for self-determination. But if for the Kosovars, what about the…Kurds spring to mind along with Kashmiris and Pathans. But we don’t want to go there, do we?

Moreover, support for the independence of Muslim Kosovars will gain the West zero credit with Islamists and probably little with moderate Muslims. After all the freeing of the Kosovars from the Serbian yoke by NATO’s aerial bombing campaign in 1999 (also without UNSC approval and in which the Canadian Air Force participated) didn’t seem to win many Muslim friends, did it?

Where this will all end knows only God…

Mark
Ottawa

They’re as different as a Venusian night and a Plutonian day, but Quebec and Alberta have found some common ground against higher taxes and a national securities regulator. Alberta’s Finance Minister Ted Morton blasted the federal Conservative government on Monday for a proposal to increase taxes on Canadians through Canada Pension Plan Premiums.

So could the provinces form a coalition of the unwilling?

Quebec chose not to take a position, but said the concerns raised about the plan need to be addressed.

Combined, the population of the two provinces is such that they could likely veto any national attempt to change the CPP.

[...]

Their united show of strength against Ottawa comes as both provincial governments are under political threat at home. Their stand suggests plenty of arm-twisting ahead if the Harper government is to succeed on pension and securities overhaul.

For now it sounds more like media speculation disguised as news, but it’s nice to think the two provinces could come together harmoniously on something.

Unfortunately, Quebec is also cooperating with another province, but this time on something less worthwhile. Jean Charest and Dalton McGuinty are busy concocting a way to destroy the recovering economy by discussing a “cap-and-trade” climate change plan.

It’s a shame that despite Quebec’s big talk about carbon emission reductions and complaining about Canada abandoning Kyoto, that the province isn’t doing so well living up to its own rhetoric.

The 30% non-solution:

…the poll conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies also reveals sharp contrasts between Quebec and English Canada…

Among Quebecers…a mere 30.1% reported they were very attached to Canada compared to 71.6% in the rest of the country…

Jack Jedwab, executive director of the association, said the poll shows more has to be done to convince Quebecers they can have an attachment to both Quebec and to Canada…

No flippin’ shoot, Sherloque.  More différences significatives:

…

There was also a significant difference between Quebecers and the rest of Canada when it came to their attachment to religion, the area where the fewest number of people reported a strong attachment.

While 25.5% of Canadians said they felt very attached to religion that number dropped to only 14.2% in Quebec.

Attachment to one’s ethnic groups was another area where there were sharp distinctions between Quebecers and the rest of the country. While 43% of Quebecers said they were very attached to their ethnic group, that dropped to 26.5% of respondents in English Canada…

This is one subject on which the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson has occasional moments when he points out painful realities we don’t like to face. Again at Daimnation!:

Why do we bother with them?

Meanwhile, Norman spectates:

…

–We bring you the latest on Steve’s Belgian model

Belgium goes to polls for election that could trigger country’s breakup…

Maybe we in the RoC should begin, er, reflecting.

Mark
Ottawa

Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf, The Gazette

Had I known when I was a child that picking up my plate and running my tongue the length of it while making loud slurping noises could possibly be the valid culinary cultural expression of a foreign people, I would have told my mother to stop being so culturally insensitive. Well, actually, my mother was fortuitous in her choice of description for my eating habits, as I doubt she could wind up before a Human Rights Commission for describing my eating as being that of a “lumberjack”. Unless that lumberjack happened to be Filipino, of course.

Then, to put to quite simply, she’d be in big trouble.

A Quebec Filipino family has won a human-rights complaint against a Montreal school board that they alleged “discriminated” against their seven-year-old son’s eating style who was described as “eating like a pig.” 100 years ago the headmaster would simply have smacked the student upside the back of the head. Today, it’s worth $17,000 to keep your white racist mouth shut.

The Quebec Human Rights Tribunal has ordered the Marguerite Bourgeoys School Board to pay Maria-Theresa Gallardo and her son, Luc Cagadoc, $17,000 in “moral and punitive damages” in a claim of racial and ethnic discrimination. It’s like something out of the Taliban-era of Afghanistan, except in reverse. The morality police have spoken, and because some seven-year-old kid had his feelings hurt, the school has to cough up some intolerance cash.

The thing is, although it may have been initially silly to reprimand the kid for his strange eating style, what does that have to do with “cultural sensitivity?” If a style of eating looks disgusting in our society, are we supposed to research the eating habits of every country, tribe, and clan on the face of the planet so that we can identify which eating habits are “cultural” and which habits are rude?

East Indians eat most foods with their hands, even though in Canadian society that’s generally frowned upon. Is it racist to feel revulsion when seeing another culture do something that has always been seen as revolting to our own culture? What happened to the rights of our culture to have opinions on the matter? Oh, that’s right. Canada doesn’t have a culture to protect.

Let’s face it. This “Human Rights” ruling scrapes the bottom of the barrel of stupidity. Is it really such a crime for a principal to suggest ways in which an immigrant can successfully integrate into Canadian society, or point out that some things that may seem appropriate in Filipino culture could be construed as offensive here? And if so, why? Why is it always Canadians who have to accommodate for everybody else?

This same school was also involved in another “gotcha” Human Rights complaint a decade ago when a Sikh student wanted to bring his ceremonial weapon to school. Any sensible society would say that it is absolutely not a “human right” to bring a weapon into a school, whether that culture believes the dagger is only ceremonial, or whether they believe it’s angel food cake. There should be rules that apply to everybody equally and regardless of so-called “cultural sensitivity.”

At my house, we take our shoes off before entering the living space. It doesn’t have to be what you do at your house, but if you want to come in my house, you’re going to have to remove them. You don’t have to come in my house, but don’t take me to a human rights court because I wanted you to respect my house rules.

Translation: “There never was a crisis. It was a media invention.”

The atrocities of stoning, burning and genital mutilation of women were officially banned in the provincial town of Herouxville in 2007 through the creation of a municipal charter that spawned a national debate. Critics said that the move was unnecessary and essentially xenophobic since such practices didn’t have the remotest chance of being committed in Herouxville, writes Marian Scott of the Montreal Gazette, not “then, now or ever.”

I might agree that the prospect of mutilating or stoning women is rather unlikely today, but who’s to say what the future holds? Perhaps Ms.Scott forgets the paradoxical adage, “never say never.” The uncertainty of a future of immigrants with variably different beliefs, customs, and convictions as ours, presents a very real challenge in our country. Herouxville’s André Drouin was merely one of the first to articulate that challenge, and spawn a debate on it.

One might say that Mr.Drouin has since been rewarded for his efforts, as the broader debate on reasonable accommodation and integration in Canada come to a head in Quebec, with women being expelled from government-funded integration courses for, ironically, failing to properly integrate.

In a classic miscalculation, the government tried to force “tolerance” down the throat of Quebeckers by implementing the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, displaying just how out of touch the political class is with the common Canadian witnessing the rapid demographic shift.

For each Canadian community trying to absorb new immigrants, there is invariably a clash of cultures, but the proponents of diversity claim that these clashes create a harmonizing blend of a new kind of Canadian. One that is enriched by the new thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of the incoming culture.

Idealistically, this sounds wonderfully beneficial to a society. The concept of a new culture arriving in the homogenized “white bread” communities of Canada and positively changing it for the better, has spawned the kind of feel-good “Dances with Wolves” distortions of reality present in television shows like the facile and painfully fictitious CBC show “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”

The fact is that if “Little Mosque” represented the true integration efforts of the Muslim minorities who settle in Montreal, Toronto, and Mississauga, the Herouxville charter could be condemned as xenophobic rubbish and be widely backed up by public opinion polls that agreed. Instead, what public opinion polls consistently show is that Canadians by and large have limitations on how far they’re willing to go with the accommodation of religious freedoms in this country.

One of the main problems with the niqab is that it is isolationist and segregationist by the very nature of what it represents. Radical Islamic doctrine on niqabs keeps women segregated not just from men, but from the prospect of friendly interaction with other Canadians, because we are not accustomed to approaching people who decide to cover their faces to this degree. The message that the niqab sends is quite simple, in a blatant and almost offensive sort of way: do not approach me.

The biggest problem with immigration in Canada isn’t how many immigrants there are, but their level of interaction in their new country. We’ve seen in Europe that some Islamic communities tend to isolate themselves, segregate from mainstream society, and impose their own cultural preferences on their adopted land, some of which are even entirely contradictory to the most deeply felt principles of the host inhabitants.

Even if it’s not realistic that inhabitants of Herouxville will ever act out the kind of barbaric and cruel events banned in the municipal charter, it was a means of opening a discussion in Canada about the kinds of people now immigrating to the country, and the beliefs and cultures they bring with them. If anyone is “out of touch with reality”, it is those who claim that a discussion on these issues will never have to take place at all.