Category: Canada

Once again proving that they wouldn’t understand a damned thing about the military if it jumped up and bit them of their sorry backsides, the Grits, Dippers and Blocheads managed to shove a dumbass motion through the House today, which demands “a moment of silence” (which is okay) and the lowering of the flag above the Peace Tower on any day a Canadian soldier is killed overseas (which most definitely is not). Some people might, with all respect and good intentions, think that this is a good idea. It isn’t. What it is, is yet another sorry example of the Leftist obsession with taking any real tradition and watering it down to meaninglessness. Peter Worthington hit the nail on the head in his column today:

Rather than supporting our troops, I’d argue it was a cynical political ploy aimed solely at embarrassing the government of Stephen Harper, which has ruled that the flag be flown at half-mast only on Remembrance Day, Nov. 11, or on specific commemorative occasions, like the death of the Sovereign. […]

“Respect” for our military from Layton? Poppycock.

With all due respect to Mr. Worthington, I’d have used a word a little more bluntly honest than “poppycock” but hey, it’s his column, right? It’ll have to do. This idiocy reminds me of when, a while back, the HypoGrits were squawking out their fartholes over the Tories’ supposed “abandoning” of the “tradition” of lowering the flag for a day for every Canadian soldier killed. One little problem with that: there was never any such tradition. The Chretien Grits started it in 2002 after we lost 4 men at Tarnak Farm. Veterans’ groups were disgusted by it. There was never a “tradition” of lowering the flag for each and every soldier. If there were, most of us would have never even seen the flag at full staff.

Think about it. We lost about 67,000 in the Great War, another 45,000 in the one after that, and hundreds more in Korea. This doesn’t include soldiers killed in those lovely, so-called “peacekeeping” operations that Leftists get so hot and bothered about (until they turn into real work). A little bit of simple arithmetic shows that, by the Grits’ logic, we should have lowered the flag in 1914 and wouldn’t be due to raise it to full staff again until sometime in the early 23rd century. Not exactly the mindset we want when thinking of the men and women who provide us with our freedom.

Don’t be fooled by the Leftist hype on this one. This has nothing to do with our soldiers. Not a damned thing. What it does have to do with, is the Grits and their fellow travelers constructing the illusion that they actually give a shit about our military after inflicting years of abuse and neglect on the very people that they’re suddenly pretending to care so much about. The Tories know better…

OTTAWA — The federal government is standing by its decision not to lower the Peace Tower flag following each casualty in Afghanistan, despite a vote by opposition MPs yesterday calling for a reversal of the policy.

The Conservatives see their position as a matter of respecting history and point out that the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill’s Peace Tower has never been routinely lowered for individual military deaths during past wars. The government is also taking a hard line on the issues, say Tory sources, because it believes some opposition MPs who supported yesterday’s bill are trying to draw attention to the Canadian deaths in Afghanistan for political gain.

Soldiers don’t want this. The National Council of Veteran Associations doesn’t want this. The Canadian Legion doesn’t want this. Right now the flag gets lowered every November 11th, in honour of all soldiers who gave their lives for this nation, and that’s enough. They don’t want any more than that.

When you lower the flag often enough, it becomes meaningless. Soldiers understand that. And God bless them for it. (more…)

Welcome, boys and girls, to my 501st post! 😀 How the hell did it ever get to this point?? 😕

Well, the upgrade to the software seems to have gone okay so far, so I’m going to get on with blabbing about what’s on my melon today: HLCs … again. If you’re one of those dimwits that is still having trouble figuring out why these things need to be gotten rid of, you really should read Lorne Gunter’s column in the Edmonton Journal today:

All you need to know about how rotten the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) is — how undemocratic and anti-freedom it has become — is that in hate-speech complaints, the commission has a 100-per-cent conviction rate.

No one who has ever been hauled before it for allegedly uttering hate speech has ever been acquitted.

[…]

You can see this in the words of lead CHRC investigator Dean Steacy. Asked by Lemire’s lawyer, Beverley Kulaszka: “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?” Steacy replied, “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value. It’s not my job to give value to an American concept.” Pardon me? Freedom of speech is entrenched in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And, of course, we inherited hundreds of years of English constitutional protection of free expression before that.

It gets a lot better than that. Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, even the Ministry Of What You Should Think has finally figured out that they can neither ignore this nor sweep it under the rug. CBC Sunday did themselves a mini-documentary on the out-of-control HLCs today (although, as you can imagine, it tries to put that typical CBC gloss over the ugliness of this Leftist farce). Grab a coffee and check out the vid (it’s about 15mins or so long): (more…)

… for any MPs that happen to stop by here.

No further commentary needed, really. This guy says it quite well all on his own.

No, not the band; ME! That’s right, I’m better than Ezra!

Chew on this, Levant… 😛

Ezra Levant seems to think he’s all hot stuff just because he managed to video tape a little interview that he had with an HLC Inquisitorâ„¢ somewheres out in Wild Rose Country and managed to slap it up in bits and pieces on YouTube. Well, la-dee-da. Isn’t that special?

Sit back and relax, ladies & gents, as I prove once and for all that I am, in fact, Better Than Ezra. It’s my very first real scoop, dontcha know? Unlike Ezra — who just managed to tape a little preliminary thingamawhatever — I have gotten my hands on… wait for it…

Actual footage of a complete Human Lefts Commission hearing!!

Yes, you read that right; the entire proceedings from beginning to end! If this doesn’t convince people that we need to get rid of these things, nothing will. And yes, the footage is authentic. I have personally conducted exhaustive research and fact-checking on this (20 minutes of surfing and 11 hours, 40 minutes to get through 3/4 of a case of Moosehead) and I can assure you that that is, in fact, Richard Warman. Don’t take my word for it, though; see it for yourself and gasp in awe of my journalistic sleuthing skills:

What the fiddlesticks is an “HLC,” you ask? Why, I’m talking about Canada’s infamous Human Lefts Commissions®, of course. Sure, that’s not what they call themselves; they like to call themselves “Human Rights Commissions.” I don’t call them that, though (or, to be more honest, I can’t call them that; not with a straight face, anyway).

I’ve grumbled about these things before. The simple fact of the matter is that they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with human rights! What they are about is, trampling people’s long-established –not to mention hard-fought– rights and liberties and ramming a dystopian, leftist agenda down the throats of the Canadian public, whether they want it or not.

By now, just about everybody’s heard about the funhouse rides that Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and MacLean’s Magazine have been dragged into by these kangaroo kourts. What you probably haven’t heard about (unless you’re a bit of a wonk for stuff like this, the way I am) are all the ordinary folks that have been beaten over the head over the years with this state-sanctioned blunt instrument. By “ordinary folks,” I mean the kinds of people that don’t have the buttloads of money and resources required to stand up to these Ministry Of Love bullies when they get dragged into Room 101. Traditionally, those have been the favourite targets of the HLC thugs. The reasoning is simple, really: like all bullies, they prefer prey that isn’t likely to be able to fight back.

You see, plaintiffs in HLC cases have all their bills picked up for them by the state (i.e., by your tax dollars and mine, whether you approve of what’s being done or not). The condemned, however, is entirely on the hook for every penny of his defense, whether he wins or not. We’re not talking chump change here, either: fighting off an HLC inquisition runs up a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s just if you win (not that anyone ever has; Miniluv has a 100% conviction rate). The process itself is a punishment before you’re even “convicted” of whatever the hell it is that you’re guilty of supposed to have done.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they only do anything about complaints that fit in line with their personal ideologies. That’s right: they pick and choose who they do and don’t listen to based on nothing more than their own personal prejudices! No guidelines enforced, no oversight, no accountability. Nothing. No rule of law, here; just a few little pisspot tyrants running their little fiefdom any way they damned well please. Ezra Levant points this out himself today in a pretty damn good post, titled “How the Canadian Human Rights Commission violates the rule of law (with my own emphasis added, of course):”

Andrew Guille filed a “hate messages” complaint with the CHRC. He complained that a website called Recomnetwork.org, run by an “anti-hate” group, contained hateful messages that contravened section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, by discriminating against people based on race, colour, national origin, religion and sexual orientation.

So what happened? Did the “anti-hate” group in question, with all of the bigoted remarks on their website, become the first defendant ever to be acquitted in a section 13 trial? Or did Guille pull a Richard Warman — slam-dunk a bigoted website and collect a few thousand dollars for bringing the complaint to the CHRC’s attention?

Neither, actually. The CHRC refused to take the matter to a tribunal hearing, ruling it a frivolous complaint. But look at the grounds upon which this complaint was dismissed: Andrew Guille, said CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, is the “sibling of both Melissa and Chris Guille”, who Steacy implies are racist. Steacy — whose job it is to investigate complaints of bigotry — indeed conducted an investigation. But not into the website and its hate messages. He investigated Guille himself. Steacy met with Sgt. Don McKinnon of the London Police Force to get the low-down on Guille; he spoke with “anti-hate” activists with their own axes to grind and books to sell. None of this was done under oath; none of this was done with Guille there to cross examine his defamers (or to challenge McKinnon’s right as a government employee to disclose Guille’s personal information without permission). But even those offensive procedures aren’t the point: the point is the CHRC simply wouldn’t accept a complaint from someone they didn’t like, for the most tenuous and circumstantial reasons.

Even if their hunches and their gossip was right — even if Guille was, himself, a racist — so what? If a website is bigoted, isn’t it the CHRC’s job (an immoral job, an improper job, but their job nonetheless) to investigate it? Does the offensiveness of the site in question depend on the character of the complainant? Is the question of whether the Canadian Human Rights Act, a law of Parliament, is violated depend on who brings an alleged offence to the attention of the commission?

Compare that sloppy, vindictive, capricious standard to the aforementioned lengths real police and real prosecutors go to, to ensure that the law is applied evenly to all citizens. What Steacy has done here is exactly the kind of arbitrariness the rape shield law was designed to prevent. If a prostitute complains that she was raped, it is improper for the police to say “she has no standing to complain about rape” or “we know that, in the past, she has consented to sex with strangers — no use investigating.” An even more exact analogy would be if a convicted rapist complained of having in turn been raped himself. That would not excuse the police from ignoring the rapist’s own complaint.

The CHRC isn’t governed by the rule of law. It is governed by the whimsy of men — in this case, Dean Steacy, who himself admits to making anonymous posts on bigoted websites.

Say whatever you like about Ezra Levant, but you have to give him credit for being a man that sticks to his principles even if it turns his stomach. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Ezra, as a Jew, found the thought of speaking up for a “white nationalist’s” rights to be a little… shall we say, distasteful? [Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a few chuckles to be had over what Guille might think about being defended by an Agent Of ZOGâ„¢, but those’re some giggles we can save for later.]

I don’t think Ezra’s too worried about that, though. He’s likely thinking about another fellow; one named Pastor Martin Niemöller. You might have heard of him. After 1937, Niemöller was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He wrote something very profound, that goes something like this:

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

In case you think Ezra’s making stuff up, here’s a .pdf of an internal CHLC document for you (taken from his site). There’s also Connie Fournier’s two cents over at Free Dominion.

Then, there’s one other little thing that Ezra mentioned today: besides being wannabe Orwellian totalitarians, they’re also a bunch of God damned racists! No, Ezra didn’t put it quite in those words, but I just did and if some HLC out there doesn’t like it, well…

What Ezra did do was to put up a link to a chart compiled by Marc Lemire (you can get it here, too) and make a very simple observation. The chart lists every section 13 decision up until November of 2007. What Ezra observed was the ethnicity of the respondents. There it was, over and over again: white, white, white, white, white… over and over again. The name “Richard Warman” pops up a hell of a lot, too (but that’s another post).

Come to think of it, I’m going to start a running tally of reasons to get rid of the HLCs altogether. If nothing else, it’ll give me something to do in my spare time (which I have too much of right now, anyway). So, what do we have so far?

1. They only support Leftist causes (sound familiar?).
2. The complainer gets all costs paid while the accused is forced to pay out of pocket (again: familiar?).
3. The very process itself IS a punishment.
4. The conviction rate is 100%!! (No, I’m not making that up) I don’t think even the Gestapo managed to pull that one off.
5. They plant fabricated evidence and willfully use it against the accused.
6. They only prosecute people of one race.
7. The rules change from case to case, as needed to ensure that the accused’s rights are properly violated.
8. Truth is not a defense.

How is it that I just know that that list’s just going to get longer?

Contrasts always make good food for thought, don’t you think? I’m rather fond of them, myself. They just seem to make things clearer for my knuckle-dragging conservative mind.

Take Afghanistan, for instance. Yes, I know there’s a cornucopia of contrasts just waiting to be observed there but for now, I’m going to stick to just a couple of things.

Let’s start off with the Phederal Fiberal Party of Canada®. You know the Fiberals, right? They’re the ones that got us into Bush/Harper’s Warâ„¢ in the first place (don’t mention that to the loopy leftosphere, though; they just hate it when somebody pops their balloon). They got us in, but didn’t really mean it, and now… Well, now they’re even eating each other over it:

Former defence minister John McCallum, in particular, is disarmingly frank, speaking openly about how Canada ended up being stuck with the unenviable job of trying to bring security to the increasingly dangerous province of Kandahar. “We dithered, and so all the safe places were taken and we were left with Kandahar.”

Is it just me, or did McCallum just take a potshot at his old boss? Ah, well, Lieberals turning on each other; what are the odds?

Then we’ve got the people that are actually putting their lives on the line in that foreign land. Soldiers like Sergeant Patrick Tower, Sergeant Michael Denine, Master Corporal Collin Fitzgerald and Private Jason Lamont from the CAF, and more recently, this lad who’s serving with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh:

Fusilier Damien Hields used his grenade machinegun to destroy seven Taliban positions before his ambushers realised he was their main threat. After peppering his vehicle with bullets, they hit the 24-year-old soldier. He had to be dragged off for treatment by his driver after he tried to continue fighting.

“Fusilier Hields showed extraordinary courage under intense fire,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Huw James, his commanding officer. “I was astonished at the state of his vehicle. There were so many holes in it, it was like a teabag. The Taliban did everything in their power to neutralise [him] and Fusilier Hields was having none of it. His actions allowed his patrol to come out of the ambush in which they were outnumbered by three or four to one and probably saved a lot of lives.” […]

Hields was one of 28 Military Crosses announced last week. There were also five Conspicuous Gallantry Crosses, the second highest award after the Victoria Cross. […]

They were on their way back to Kandahar on June 3, driving south in a valley, when the Taliban attacked. One of the Land Rovers hit a landmine and was flipped upside down by the blast. “There were Taliban dug in all around and they started hitting us with AK47s and mortars. We could not see where they were at first.”

Hields followed the trail of RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades coming towards him and started firing grenades one at a time, trying to home in. “Then I switched to automatic fire,” he said. A grenade machine gun has a box with 32 grenade rounds. “I emptied a box onto that position and you could see all the dust and smoke flying about where they hit.

“After that no fire came back from that position and I moved on to the next one. One or two rounds until I got onto the target, and switch to automatic and empty the box.”

Realising that Hields was the main threat to them, the remaining Taliban fighters homed in on him with their RPG7s, Dushka heavy machineguns and Kalash-nikov rifles. Hields was undaunted and continued firing.

“I got through six boxes in about 15 minutes and we were winning the fight,” he said. “They started it. We were going to finish it.”

One of the Taliban rounds finally hit home as he was bending down to reload. “I felt a sharp punch in the kidneys on my right side,” he said. “It knocked me into the bottom of the [Land-Rover]. I looked down and saw a hole in my body armour and a bit of blood.”

Hields was dragged out of the Taliban fire and back about 20 yards where Lance-Corporal Carley Williams, the female medic attached to the troops, had dashed through enemy fire to set up a first aid position.

“The lads were screaming at me to get into cover,” said Williams, 23, from Llanelli. They saw one round actually pass between my legs.” She was awarded the Joint Commanders’ Commendation for her bravery.

Hields said: “It turned out the bullet had smashed a rib and gone out of me again without touching any internal organs which was very lucky. It was just a flesh wound really.”

He and the other wounded were evacuated by helicopter. After treatment and recuperation, Hields was back taking part in operations in Afghanistan in July. “Obviously I’m extremely proud but I’ve got friends still recovering from injuries and it’s them I’m more worried about.”

Funny, the way some things can look when you put them next to each other, isn’t it?