The survival of a two-week old lamb from Cedar, B.C. is “a miracle,” according to an animal protection officer. Apparently in the post-speciesism era we live in the survival of livestock constitutes an act of intervention from God.

The lamb, who of course has since been named “Murphy”, is alive following an attack on its mother and eight other sheep by a cougar. (In its defence, the cougar is well-known for its inclination to prey on young things). The incident occurred on a rural property in the south of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.

A cougar attacking and eating sheep isn’t newsworthy, nor is a two-week-old sheep who has been anthropomorphically dubbed Murphy, but apparently what is newsworthy is the fact that the landowner did nothing to stop this heinous animal-on-animal crime:

Hitchcock, who has worked as a special provincial constable for the BCSPCA in Nanaimo for four years, said what she found most disturbing is that the owner of the property and the sheep was aware of the attack, but didn’t assist the animals in any way or even report the incident to authorities.

She said she was called to the scene by city bylaw officers who were contacted by neighbours days after the attack.

Hitchcock said charges are pending against the property owner, who she still has not made contact with despite numerous phone calls and letters, and they may include charges under the criminal code as well as under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

It’s bad enough that the state now has the power to ensure your parenting meets with the appropriate guidelines set out by various ministries of government. But the country has truly jumped the shark when livestock property suddenly become a moral responsibility worthy of criminal charges. Let me say that again: criminal charges for not doing something to protect livestock.

“Murphy was found alone and hyperthermic in the rain so we rushed him to a veterinarian and, fortunately, he survived.”

First of all, there’s no such thing as Murphy. That’s ridiculous. It’s a lamb, and is usually served best with lemon and rosemary and a side of apple sauce. I’m sure the cougar would agree, if it had the intelligence to articulate that opinion. Fortunately, like the lamb, it doesn’t. That’s probably because it’s an animal.

In a post-agrarian nation I can understand the domestication of certain animals as companion pets. Dogs and cats have certainly edged their way into the status of protected animals, if only because of common social conventions. Enough people have either one or the other in their home, and though some people anthropomorphize them in baby high chairs and woollen jackets, they have earned their place.

Lambs, on the other hand, are good for one of two things. Food for humans or food for other animals. Any attempt to make them more than that is the kind of folly that your grandfather would have given you a stern look and questioned your sanity.

But sane is not how one might describe the modern world.

“Murphy is a pet and we intend to conduct home visits to anyone interested in adopting him.”

State visits to your house to ensure you’re not cooking lamb. Yeah, that sounds like the kind of world I want to live in.

Photo credit: Kristen Thompson, Metro Vancouver News

If you read this article you might actually think nihilistic rebel without a cause Jean Wharf was refused entry to the SkyTrain solely because of a button reading “F**ck Yoga” (without the asterisks).

But the truth is that the whiner was first caught trying to use the transit system without paying and issued a fine. Then when she returned with a paid ticket, she was informed she would have to remove the pin.

Well, there are two things that come to mind when I think about the pin incident, but it’s pretty clear to me that Wharf wouldn’t have been told to remove it if she hadn’t brought attention to herself by sneaking onto the train.

The first impulse might be to defend the free expression of thought as protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but even within that document itself is the flexible language that stipulates there are “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

And given that TransLink is private property, it’s certainly within their right to prohibit vulgar or offensive people that trespass their own rules. It’s the second rule, actually, in their list of 10 posted on their website.

Further to the point, even if I happen to agree with Wharf’s message pertaining to yoga, the use of vulgar language in public should be weighed in conjunction with the social responsibility not to pollute the minds of younger people — and I’m thinking of my 9-year-old son, who is an excellent reader, here — with hateful language.

But aside from all the debate about whether a person should be harassed for wearing a “F**k Yoga” pin or not, the bigger issue here is the fact that Wharf isn’t just telling yoga to fornicate with itself, she’s telling every taxpayer the same thing by jumping the fare. In fact, thanks to nihilists like her and others in no short supply in this city, TransLink is spending $170 million on smart card fare readers and toll gates.

Wharf is the kind of person who “rides for free” through life, assuming someone else will pay her way every time. And it’s probably not entirely her fault. After all, we live in the kind of society that tells irresponsible alcoholics and drug addicts that they’re victims of a disease instead of parasites on the working class.

It’s probably reasonable for Wharf to conclude that paying fares for public transit is something only the sheeple do on their way to their soul-crushing jobs. It’s also probably reasonable to speculate that Wharf doesn’t have a job, or if she does, it doesn’t involve dressing in a manner that requires social observances of things like respect, decorum and decency for others.

If you do want to dress like you hate the world and wear pins expressing your contempt for it, you should probably consider paying your fair way, lest the world turn around and say, no, “f**k you.”

Author’s Note — this post has been modified to remove a pejorative.

I was watching a movie on my computer last Monday when the screen suddenly froze, the computer coughed a few times, and then it keeled over and died. Attempts at resuscitation failed. This is the primary reason I haven’t blogged in about a week.

A few days later I realized I have a 10-inch Acer notebook, and after some finagling I managed to find a USB mouse and keyboard, hook up my speakers, and attach my 21-inch desktop monitor to the laptop and treat it as a makeshift desktop. It has actually worked out fairly well so far, although I did do a post-mortem on my computer to find out the exact cause of death.

A trip to NCIX got me a new motherboard, power supply and DVD Rom, all of which I think were dead. (The DVD player had been broken for a while, thanks to an episode of impatience when I tried to force it open with a screwdriver). So when these are all installed I should be back to the usual setup.

The reason you can expect more light posting is that although I’m finished journalism school there’s one more week in which our college newspaper simulates a daily newspaper. We put out a newspaper every day from Monday to Friday, and the hours are going to be long.

But after this week I should have more time to get back to writing again. There’s also a good chance I’ll be leaving Vancouver soon, as I’m looking to settle into a small-town newspaper, but I’ll let people know when those details are finalized.

The following is a news story I wrote about tonight’s city council meeting in Vancouver. It is not an opinion piece.

More than 160 people registered to speak at Vancouver City Council Monday night as hundreds rallied to oppose a proposal to build a $450 million casino by BC Place.

At least 200 demonstrators gathered outside of City Hall to protest the casino, some wearing yellow t-shirts reading “save our jobs” and holding signs declaring “Vancouver, not Vegas.”

Sandy Garossino, spokeswoman for the anti-casino coalition, addressed the chanting crowd with a megaphone before the meeting.

“Promises of easy money are the easiest promises in the world to make,” she said.

City Council will consider three main components of the hotel and casino proposal: Rezoning the land to include a casino adjacent to BC Place; relocation of the Edgewater Casino from its current site to the rezoning site; and expansion of the casino.

The land is owned by the provincial Crown corporation PavCo, which also owns BC Place. Paragon Gaming, a Las Vegas company, already owns the Edgewater Casino, presently located on the North East side of False Creek.

David Podmore, Chair of PavCo, said that similar large-scale projects in the past were also met with strong resistance, including Expo ’86 and BC Place itself.

“It’s easy to be the critic,” he said to loud boos from the crowd outside. “It’s a lot tougher to be a proponent.”

A raucous heckler walked into council chambers during Podmore’s speech to interrupt him before returning to the gallery. Interruptions during the meeting were common, prompting warnings from Mayor Gregor Robertson.

BC Lottery Corporation president Michael Graydon said 5,500 jobs would be created during construction of the complex, bringing much-needed stability to the Downtown Eastside.

After the presentation by the applicant team, city councillors were given time to ask questions. Several councillors were concerned that not enough public consultation had been done prior to the proposal to measure the impact of the expansion.

“We were assured [in 2004] that the Edgewater would be the casino… there would be no need to go further,” Coun. Tim Stevenson said. “It almost feels like somehow those promises… have been done away with.”

Coun. Ellen Woodsworth was not convinced a proper impact study had been conducted to assess the risk to young people in the community.

“What does it look like when people between 18 and 34 become problem gamblers?” she asked.

The Social Responsibility Fund Agreement of the proposal offers $200,000 to the city annually to mitigate the possible negative impacts of gambling.

Opponents of the proposal, composed of community groups and prominent citizens, have argued that the casino will hurt the neighbourhood and drain money from other businesses.

In 2009 council approved a plan for North East False Creek that guides future redevelopment of the parcels of land in question. This proposed rezoning would contribute approximately 800,000-square-feet of commercial space towards achieving the target of 1,900 full-time-equivalent jobs.

If approved, the expansion of the Edgewater casino would make it the largest in Western Canada, increasing to 1,500 slot machines and up to 150 gaming tables from 600 slot machines and 75 gaming tables.

I was returning home from a silly stakeout at 2 a.m. tonight (don’t ask), driving along the wet empty streets of North Vancouver with the radio turned up loud. And there’s something about driving at night, when the road is empty and the surrounding world is sleeping, that is really enjoyable.

The darkness creates a sort of enveloping tunnel around the beams of light in front as the car races ahead. The music, depending on the selection, carries you through the rhythm of the road as it twists and turns. I sometimes eschew the direct route, just to avoid having to stop the car and break the momentum.

I remember when my daughter was younger and she didn’t want to go to sleep, I would gladly put her in the car and go for a ride. Sometimes I would just start driving along the empty highway, cruising in the darkness and let the white noise put her to sleep. It reminds me of my own days as a child when I would get into the car late at night and wake up in my own bed in the morning.

I love long drives. I can sit in a car for longer than most people would find it comfortable. But if I’m in the driver’s seat, I can go for 14 or 16 hours at a time. And I have. When I drove out to Vancouver from Toronto in 2008 by myself, I did Thunder Bay on the first day, Moose Jaw on the second, Calgary on the third and reached the coast on the fourth. It could have been done in three but I wanted to stop at a friend’s house in Calgary so he could show me the city.

Maybe there’s something about my personality, that I can sit in a car and just zone out and drive for hours. It’s that time you can really be alone with yourself without wondering what you’re going to do with yourself while you’re alone. It’s simple. You’re driving.

One of the best night drives exists on the west coast. If you go along the TransCanada into North Vancouver and follow it up to Whistler, you’ll find yourself on the winding, curving Sea-to-Sky highway. If you’re lucky there will be a full moon to illuminate the ocean as you cruise the twists and turns in the darkness of the highway. On one side the shimmering waters and on the other the looming shadow of mountains.

Of course I can’t do that much anymore. I don’t make any money while I’m in school and gasoline on the coast hit $1.30 today. I’m putting gas in the tank in $10 increments, hoping something will happen in the Middle East to calm this mess down. In the meantime I’m using the bus to go everywhere.

I know there are people who love the bus and swear by public transit. I guess it’s effective in an urban area, and it works in a utilitarian sort of way, even though there are times it resembles our public health care system (long waits, unreliable, often poor service).

But there’s nothing like the freedom of getting into a car and going anywhere you want. For all of the talk of global warming, and no matter where you stand on the issue, Canada is a really large place, and if you want to get anywhere in a time that’s reasonably dependent on your own agenda, you’d better have a car. (Public transit is sort of the socialism of transportation, while the automobile is the free market.)

The funny thing is that my car isn’t even very good. It’s a 1997 Ford Escort stationwagon with poor fuel economy. When I last visited Ontario in 2009 I rented a Chevrolet Impala and drove the back roads of the Bruce Peninsula with some real horsepower for once. I cannot honestly say I obeyed all the speed limits.

I had an even older car, a 1993 Saturn, that I lost to the environmentalist laws of the city of Vancouver. It wouldn’t pass the emissions testing, so we had to give it up for scrap. The sad thing is that that baby traversed Canada twice without so much as a whimper. It was a good reliable car and it was good on the gas.

Vancouver is trying to reinvent itself as a bicycle city, as though it thinks it’s Copenhagen or any other European city with a dense population. That’s fine, I guess, except for the fact the city wasn’t designed to be a bike city and it rains too much for more than 5 per cent of the people to want to do it.

But you can’t jump on your bike and decide you’re going to drive to Chilliwack for apple pie. You can’t go tearing along the coastal mountain range at night in the driving rain listening to music. And you sure can’t load the family up on short notice to drive to the top of Seymour and look at the Lower Mainland as the sun sets.

The funny thing is that the two things that most revolutionized the modern world would have to be the incandescent light bulb and the automobile. Both have come under attack for being unfriendly to the environment, yet both are symbolic of the greatest technological achievements of post-industrial civilization. The car brings the freedom of unlimited movement and the light bulb the ability to do it in the dark.

People keep talking about peak oil, a day when this wonderful ride will come to a crashing halt. And some people even want that day to come as soon as possible. To them I’d suggest they go for a nice long night drive and think about what that would really mean.

By now most people in Canada, and quite possibly beyond, have heard that 100 sled dogs were culled — some of them allegedly inhumanely — by a Whistler company following the finish of the 2010 Olympic games. The news created shock and outrage from dog lovers everywhere, who couldn’t imagine how a company suddenly decided to euthanize that many dogs at once without finding alternative homes for them.

Less than a week after the news, Premier Gordon Campbell made an unusual decision that should equally shock and outrage British Columbians. He announced a public inquiry into the “inhumane” treatment of the animals, appointing Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Terry Lake to lead it. The task force will include representation from the British Columbia Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BCSPCA) and the Union of B.C. Municipalities, to review the circumstances related to the dog killings and make recommendations to prevent it from happening again.

Why should that outrage anybody? Well, to begin with, let’s look at the use of the word “humane” in conjunction with the euthanizing of dogs. The reason we don’t use the word murder, massacre or atrocity when talking about animals is that they aren’t humans, who are worthy and deserving of a higher level of compassion and sympathy. Or so one would think.

This speedy inquiry announcement happened so quickly that it can only leave those who have been trying to get the government to call inquiries into more important issue for decades shaking their heads. Perhaps the most egregious example was the time it took to call an inquiry into women reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside from 1997 to 2002.

As of Dec.11, 2002 there were 62 women listed as missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside district, all believed to be murder victims. More shameful still, the stain of B.C.’s “Highway of Tears” remains ignored to this day, as the 800-kilometre section of road between Prince George and Prince Rupert is believed to have been the last known location for 32 women since 1969.

But inquiries into murdered women, many of whom were prostitutes and drug addicts, isn’t a populist vehicle the government of the day can ride to higher approval ratings. And if social media reception is any indication, missing furry friends, not missing women, is clearly the inquiry that people want.

It took three years after the conviction of serial killer Robert Pickton for the government to call an inquiry into the botched police investigation that could have got him behind bars sooner, saving as many as 14 lives.

British Columbians are used to waiting for years, and sometimes decades, before the government decides to open inquiries on important issues. Frank Paul, a 47-year-old Mi’kmaq, died of hypothermia after his limp body was dragged from a Vancouver police jail and left in a back alley on Dec. 5, 1998. It took 12 years to launch a public inquiry into the decision not to charge the police for the act.

And it took 14 months and an unprecedented scandal in the BC RCMP before the taser death of Robert Dziekanski went before Justice Thomas Braidwood in a public inquiry into the incident at Vancouver International Airport in 2007.

It isn’t just murder inquiries that refuse to be addressed either. The stench of the seven-year BC Rail case and the house arrest that was given to Dave Basi and Bob Virk has still not gone away. The two pleaded guilty in October to breach of trust and accepting benefits in exchange for leaking confidential information about the BC Rail bidding process in 2003. For taking the fall, Basi-Virk had their six-year legal ordeal covered by the taxpayers to the order of $6 million.

Thanks to the anthropomorphizing effect of dogs in our culture, we can seemingly cull runaway populations of rabbits, but not dogs. No, dogs are a Canadian sacred cow, above things like corruption, murder and human injustice.

A Vancouver Province article says that “dozens of angry Asian residents” of an upscale highrise near UBC are going to protest a proposed 15-bed hospice planned next door. According to the residents who are upset, it is a “cultural taboo” to have dying people so close to a residential area (a hospice is a palliative care building for the terminally ill).

One source in the article states 80 per cent of the residents of the 18-storey building are Asian, and are strongly opposed on cultural grounds. But that isn’t the only problem here:

“Units here are worth $1 million,” she added. “We put our life savings into this.”

She said residents are worried the hospice will have a negative impact on their property values.

[...]Qing Lin, who bought a Promontory apartment for $900,000 almost a year ago, said she and her seven year old daughter will have nightmares if the hospice goes ahead.

“We believe that people dying outside will bring us bad luck,” she added. “I’m very angry and upset. If I had known it was going to be a hospice, I wouldn’t buy it for half the price.”

It’s more than a little difficult to accommodate the notion that a hospice is bad luck, even if one were inclined to be sensitive to cultural beliefs. But the idea that it will affect property values is similarly ridiculous. Perhaps the statement should be altered to read that it will affect property values within the superstitious Asian community.

But fear not, overpriced million-dollar condos in Vancouver continue to be unaffected by a proposed hospice. There is certainly no shortage of buyers in this city willing to pay too much for too little.

The article continues:

“It’s very disturbing,” she said. “My kids and I are going to feel so frightened and angry just to think there are dying people so close to us.”

[...]Sharon Wu, chairwoman of the UNA said 60 residents came to a UNA board meeting Tuesday.

“The UNA respects cultural beliefs,” she said. “UBC is planning to address the concerns of the residents. It’s a very emotional and sensitive issue.”

Well, the kids will feel frightened and angry only if the parents happen to pass down this preposterous superstition to the next generation. There is always the option, however, of being more mature about the fact that in a society there are the young and the old, the living and the dying. I’m sure that someone dying next door is a discomforting thought, but I’m also pretty sure it’s a worse situation for the person actually doing the dying.

A little maturity, sensitivity and understanding toward people suffering would seem to me to be the more responsible thing than worrying about the property values of the nearby residents.

[A little birdie told me this story: Blazing Cat Fur]

Almost a century after the fact and long after everybody associated with the incident is dead, the federal government is throwing some money at a project in lieu of an official apology.

The infamous 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which 376 passengers from India were turned away from Canada after spending months at sea, prompted an unofficial apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper while visiting a Vancouver suburb back in August of 2008.

At the time the Sikh community in Surrey wasn’t satisfied with the apology one bit. You see, the Chinese had gotten their apology in the House of Commons for the Head Tax Act, and Sikhs wanted the same.

No further apology was issued in Parliament, but the federal Conservatives have made sudden and unexpected restitution by funding two Vancouver projects that will commemorate the incident. Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney made the announcement in a written statement on Sunday.

“Prime Minister Harper was the first prime minister in Canadian history to recognize the tragic nature of the Komagata Maru incident. He is also the first prime minister to apologize to the Indo-Canadian community for it.”

The government will give $82,500 and $104,000 to Vancouver’s Khalsa Diwan Society to create a monument and a museum dedicated to the Komagata Maru.

But why now?

This is one of those government moves I just don’t understand. Nobody in the Sikh community was asking for a museum and a monument. They wanted an apology in the House of Commons, which was refused.

The problem I have with the Komagata Maru incident being commemorated is that I’m not sure it’s the black mark in Canadian history we’re constantly told it is.

Certainly the historical record shows that racism was prevalent in 1914 and even the local newspapers warned of the coming peril of undesirable tides of immigrants arriving on the shores of British Columbia. Attitudes were vastly different a century ago and we’ve acknowledged that immigration decisions were often made based on race.

But Canada has never surrendered its sovereign right to chose whom it allows inside its borders. A decision was made to disallow the Komagata Maru ship in 1914 based on the laws of the country of the day.

The Canadian government was within its legal rights — even if the policy is deemed racist by today’s standards — to turn aside the ship based on the passage of an order-in-council restriction of immigrants who “in the opinion of the Minister of the Interior” did not “come from the country of their birth or citizenship by a continuous journey and or through tickets purchased before leaving their country of their birth or nationality.”

A similar agreement now exists between the United States and Canada in which refugees cannot claim status in one country if he or she has already passed through the other.

The Komagata Maru incident was hardly the fault of Canada alone. It was a test of Gurdit Singh Sandhu, a wealthy fisherman in Singapore who was fully aware of exclusion laws in Canada prohibiting Punjabis (and other groups). The Komagata Maru, not unlike the flotilla to Gaza, was a means of challenging the laws of Canada. This was therefore a political, rather than a humanitarian, mission from the outset.

Canada faced a nearly identical challenge this year when the unseaworthy Thai freighter MV Sun Sea took 490 Tamils from Thailand to Vancouver, circumventing several legitimate other asylum destinations along the way. Canada was chosen, it has since been said by Canada’s former high commissioner to Sri Lanka Martin Collacott, because we’re “an easy mark.”

It is fortunate that we allowed these 490 Tamils into Canada on compassionate grounds, lest our great-grandchildren erect monuments with taxpayer dollars proclaiming our inhumanity.

But it does raise an important question. How much more must Canada prostrate itself before all former injustices have been restored?

Shall the government apologize for every ethnic minority that has felt in the least mistreated since arriving on these most coveted of shores? Is there not a means of simply apologizing for everything all at once and getting the whole thing over with? Surely we can’t continue to go about finding ancient grievances in order to throw modern tax dollars at them in self-righteous rectification?

If we do continue, however, perhaps we could take a few moments in remembrance to the suffering of our European forebears, not all of whom were given free dental, health and welfare upon arrival in the new world. Acknowledging the struggle of immigrants — wherever their origin on the planet — would seem to me to be a more legitimate form of restitution than the cherrypicking taking place with the announcement of this memorial pay off.

Photo: Jenny McCarthy, The Labradorian.

Maclean’s writer John Geddes mulls over the difference between two premiers who have stepped down this month: Gordon Campbell and Danny Williams. Focusing specifically on wringing concessions from Ottawa, Geddes observes that Williams was able to get 61 per cent more in federal transfer payments per capita than Campbell.

Newfoundland residents will receive $2,268 per person — at least that’s the theoretical value of the transfer payments — compared with the $1,385 for B.C. residents. As Geddes said, it might make sense for Newfoundland to get more because of relative wealth and economic circumstances. But according to Stats Canada the average weekly pay in Newfoundland was $798.82 in 2009, compared with B.C.’s $797.13.

That still doesn’t tell the whole story. Median total income by family type for 2008 was $67,890 in B.C. compared with $59,320 in Newfoundland. And the latest unemployment numbers shows B.C.’s unemployment rate fell to 7.4 per cent in October, compared with 13 per cent in Newfoundland for the same time period. Does this mean it makes sense for Newfoundland to get 61 per cent more than B.C. since it has a 57 per cent higher unemployment rate?

It may be important to crunch a few more numbers than that. Total unemployment is 33,800 in Newfoundland compared with 185,100 for B.C., which if put into this perspective means that B.C.’s need is five and a half times greater. And as much as 20 per cent of B.C.’s employment is sustained by part-time workers compared with 12 per cent for Newfoundland. Both provinces have an equal amount of full-time workers as a portion of their provincial total.

All of this would make sense with everything else being equal in cost of living. But those factors aren’t equal. It’s understood that at least 2.3 million people live in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, which has some of the highest cost of living prices in Canada. The housing market in Vancouver is widely considered to be the most expensive in the world.

But as one reader of the Macleans article points out, the elephant in the room is the Atlantic Accord that Danny Williams went to war with Ottawa over. Newfoundland’s 2010-11 transfer payments consist of $389 million from the 1985 Accord (down 30 per cent from 2008-09). Removing that total would bring payments down to $767 million and make per capita payments $1,500, which would be little more than the $1,385 received by B.C.

Put into this context, it isn’t that Newfoundland receives an inordinate amount of transfer payments from Ottawa. It’s that Newfoundland has fought to protect the Atlantic Accord.

Maclean’s contributors Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler wrote a controversial article recently called ‘Too Asian’? that explores the demographic curiosities of Canadian universities. In particular the University of Toronto was cited as being full of too many students from China who do little but eat, sleep and study, making the institution dull and the competition almost impossible to keep up with for white students who want to do a little post-secondary partying.

You may judge the journalistic merits of the article yourself, but I thought that — other than the difficulty of finding authoritative sources to interview for the relative whiteness or non-whiteness of a university being perhaps a tad ambitious for a magazine article — the authors made a good attempt at discussing a topic generally ignored.

The strong reaction to the article is more indicative of the elements of truth, than evidence that presenting facile generalizations of Asians as being studious bores is racist. The writers attempted to interview students and ask them what they think about the demographic trends and they were given answers that some people didn’t want to hear. But that’s hardly a reason to shoot the messenger.

And let’s face it. Our society has cultivated an over-sensitivity to racial profiling to the point that legitimate statistical evidence is wrongly construed. It seems most people missed the big success story of the article as well.

As Tony Kellar points out in the National Post, the fact so many non-whites are attending universities serves as a successful example of the advantages to merit-based scholastic acceptance:

Taken together, the data suggests that Asians are the largest group at UBC-Vancouver, at close to 50% of the undergrad student body. That’s above the proportion of Asian-Canadians in Vancouver’s population, and far above the proportion in the population of B.C., or Canada.

To which we should say: hallelujah. Break out the champagne already. Canadian visible minorities are somewhat more likely than white Canadians to attend university. And Asian Canadians, the country’s largest immigrant and minority group, appear to be more likely to attend university than the majority white population. This is a problem?

Even rabble isn’t keen to lob criticism at the piece. After priming himself to be enraged about an article he had heard was warning of an “Asian invasion,” Amarnath Amarasingam writes:

After reading the article, I suspected that many of the critics had not bothered to read past the title before concluding that Maclean’s was engaging in moral panic, fear mongering, irresponsible journalism and racism.

[...] I suspect that if the article was entitled “Asian students working hard at Canadian universities” instead of “‘Too Asian’?” it would not have incited much controversy.

And though I hardly need to remind journalists, the general public should probably be aware that we don’t write our own headlines save for our opinionated blogs. Indeed, that jewel of an unfunny headline above was all my creation.