Jean Chretien is ordering out his RCMP hit squad as I write. Guite is getting ready to rat:

In his response to the $30-million suit, Guite alleges that even when he questioned or recommended that certain contracts not be awarded, he was told "it is the prime minister's budget and we decide on the events, how much to allocate in funds and what agency will manage the event.

"In many cases," the statement says, "sponsorships were refused at the bureaucratic level but reversed at the political level."

Guite lays the blame for the scandal directly on his higher-ups -- former minister of public works Alfonso Gagliano and former prime minister Jean Chretien. He says the suit against him should be dropped and those in power at the time should be sued instead.

Of course Mr Guite could join Chretien and Gagliano to the suit if he feels so strongly and he must certainly regret his decision not to cut a deal and roll on his political masters back in the time of Gomery.

A few months ago I posted about problems with the Newfoundland Jury List. Apparently the problems have been remedied:

Embarrassing problems with Newfoundland and Labrador's jury list — which caused a mistrial in May in the high-profile case of a physician accused of drug trafficking — have been resolved, the justice minister says.

Tom Osborne says the old list, which had not been updated in about eight years, has been replaced by a new system that will have real-time updates.

"We've done a dry run of the list, where we've pulled together a pool of potential jurors and selected a jury from that potential pool," Osborne said Wednesday.

"We've then analyzed the whole process and determined that it's working efficiently, it's working effectively, and that there are no glitches or bugs within the system."

The old list was based on data last updated in 1999, and collected by the motor vehicle registration system.

The new list is based on the provincial government's database for MCP, the medicare agency, and is cross-referenced with motor vehicle registration records and the provincial voters' list.

(Tom Osborne as  Minister of Justice? I don't know if you have to be a lawyer, but a University degree would be nice. Depite what people think, it is complicated stuff and I doubt that Osborne can't grasp the complexities when advised. His decisions (not that he makes any serious ones without the OK of Premier Danny Williams, who was quite an accomplished lawyer) can only be political.)

What are the progressives progressing towards?

Does anyone have an answer? A guess?

Hillary Clinton has chosen a campaign song and lost the vote of all self-respecting males across the 50 states..

(HT. Hot Air)

...

Most cynical of all, however, are the moralistic pundits, academics and journalists who deplore the "nativism" of Americans they consider to be less-educated yokels. Yet their own jobs of writing, commenting, reporting and teaching are rarely threatened by cheaper illegal workers. Few of these well-paid and highly educated people live in communities altered by huge influxes of illegal aliens. Their professed liberality about illegal immigration usually derives from seeing hardworking waiters, maids, nannies and gardeners commute to their upscale cities and suburbs to serve them well — and cheaply. In general, such elites don't use emergency rooms in the inner cities and rural counties overcrowded by illegal aliens. They don't drive on country roads frequented by those without licenses, registration and insurance. And their children don't struggle with school curricula altered to the needs of students who speak only Spanish. For many professors, politicians and columnists, the gangs, increased crime and crowded jails that often result from massive illegal immigration and open borders are not daily concerns, but rather stereotypes hysterically evoked by paranoid and unenlightened others in places like Bakersfield and Laredo. ...

Read the whole thing.

Hanson's book Mexifornia is also an excellent read on the realities of illegal immigration.

Canada's top doctor singled out New Democrat leader Jack Layton yesterday for "hypocrisy" for undergoing hernia treatment at a private Toronto medical clinic.

But Brian Day, president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association, was quick to note Layton is in good company.

Former prime ministers Paul Martin, Jean Chretien and Joe Clark also have been treated at private medical clinics, Day told the annual meeting of the Canadian Science Writers' Association.

And he said union leader Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Autoworkers, proved a master at "queue jumping" when he got in for an MRI within 24 hours of injuring his leg.

Read the rest

This is the way the CBC remebers Adscam ... not as a corrupt Liberal Party but as a Liberal Party painted corrupt by the opposition:

The sponsorship program, now defunct, was designed to raise the federal government's profile in the wake of the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec. Over its life, Liberal-friendly ad firms in that province took in millions of taxpayers' dollars.

Some of the money ended up in the pockets of high-ranking Liberal organizers in Quebec, allowing the opposition to paint the government of former prime minister Jean Chrétien as corrupt.

Poor Jean Chretien... he was treated so unfairly... why everyone knows that he and his buddies never got a dime. And Paul Martn knew nothing about it .... nor did Dion or Tobin or Copps....

The spanking delivered by Miller to Sen. Harry Reid is top shelf..

Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a long way to winning my vote..

With so much accepted truth out there in the media and in the legislatures of Canada, we need to look south of the border to find a debate that would be worth watching:

The Editors’ Challenge This should be an offer that the Wall Street Journal can’t refuse — debate the editors of National Review on the immigration bill. ...

It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week. Click here to watch — you have to see it to believe it. We urge them to come out of the shadows, and hope defending the bill in this forum is not another one of those jobs that no American will do. (We would challenge President Bush himself to a debate on behalf of the conservatives he has maligned, but we fear he hasn’t read the bill.)

Where can I tune in?

Justin Trudeau...now there's a deep thinker ... Speaking to "adoring" high school students, he offered this:

Trudeau suggested to the students the capitalist "machine" that sustains modern existence may also become modern civilization's downfall.

The system promotes exploitation of natural resources without accounting for future consequences of consumption, he said.

"Our capitalist model has given us tremendous things," Trudeau said. "But the time has come for us to look at it critically and try to improve on it, given the accelerated pace of change and the fact that we have limited space."

Trudeau said Canada's environmental and social justice record have deteriorated.

"We consume more water per capita than anyone else on the planet. We produce more solid waste than just about anyone else on the planet. In terms of social justice, our treatment of our aboriginal communities are an absolute disgrace."

Tinkering with capitaism by placing state controls on the market have failed worldwide. Sure the civil servants make out like bandits, but the rest of us are left beholden to the state to maintain some sort of passable standard of living. Still, the juvenile question, why can't we all just get along, makes the idea of tinkering for the greater good desirable.

Trudeau seems able to spout his old man's conclusions, but I doubt he's given it much thought. For his information, we have more water than anyone else, per capita or in volume. Are we supposed to stop consuming water just because there is less water in Arizona? Stop Consuming out of guilt? Where is the water going if we don't consume it? I'm not talking about draining the rivers or anything, but water consumption is not exactly a priority for Canadains is it?  More solid waste? Huh? We are 30 million people with, in case you haven't noticed,  plenty of places to put it and the natural resources of Canada are found in alomst all of them. I guess we are going to run out of trees soon ...wait...the tree cover in North America is increasing .... never mind. The Liberal policy of throwing money at aborignals until they are all dead is something that Mr Trudeau can address with his party if and when he gets elected.

The Ontario Liberals have been dodging questions about a sponsorship slush fund for at least a month. Premier McGuinty took the early position of avoiding Question period all together; so too his impugned Minister, Mike Colle. Now that they have shown up, the answer is to call the Tories racists or to avoid the question. The Star opines:

The daily ritual in the Ontario Legislature is called "question period" for a reason: for 60 minutes MPPs may ask questions of the government, but they can't count on getting answers.

However, last week's performance by the Liberal government was even worse than usual in this respect and ought not to be allowed to pass without comment.

The opposition asked a series of questions about the decision-making process that lay behind some $30 million in government grants to various and sundry ethnic groups, some with Liberal ties.

The government responded by either changing the subject or impugning the motives of the questioners.

Not once was a question on the so-called slush fund directly answered by a government minister.

The whole article is well worth the read and concludes:

By the end of last week, the Liberals were looking pretty chuffed with themselves.

They ought not to be. Their handling of this file has been the nadir of their four years in office.

The sad part is that there is an election coming up in the fall, and for all of the condemnation by The Star of the handling of this clear use of tax dollars for political purposes including lining the pockets of the government's buddies, I'm willing to bet that The Star will be endorsing McGuinty and the Liberals in October.

via CBC:

PQ Leader Boisclair is resigning

While it was becoming apparent that he could not survive if Gilles Ducieppe decided to contest the leadership, one would have expected Boisclair to put up some sort of fight. He burnt the bridge when reached it.

Nicolas Sarkozy wins the grand prix!

Cash Money. It is the legal tender of the country and you can buy whatever you want with it from anyone but the Candadian government:

Cash no longer accepted for paying taxes

Ottawa will no longer accept cash payments from people paying their taxes at service counters across the country.

The Canada Revenue Agency says it will still accept cash payments made through banks, however. Service counters will continue to accept cheque and debit payments.

Apparently it's too inconvenient....

The agency says it made the change because the amount of people who pay by cash is so small.

Of the seven per cent of taxpayers who make payments at the service counters, less than one per cent pay by cash, said Revenue Canada spokesperson Heather Cameron.

"It comes down to the fact … that there's so few people that are actually making their payments in cash now," said Cameron.

And here I was thinking that it was legal tender and if you tendered it on the government in payment, the government is to accept the same. A refusal to accept would certainly give rise to the question of whether penalties or interest would accrue.

(also at The London Fog)

I had a call from a client all concerned about her Charter rights being violated by her employer. While it was dubious that her contractual rights, let alone her rights under provincial human rights legislation, had been violated in any regard, the simple rule is that the Charter applies to state actions. Still, we have people always going on about their rights, not realizing that the rights they clam are mere privileges bestowed by the applicable legislature.

Racial profiling is an issue for the police. Some racial profiling is apparently acceptable when you are running an affirmative action program.Other racial profiling is not good,as in  when the police stop a driver simply because he is black. Now racial profiling has taken on  a whole new realm, that of international hockey, according to Gilles Duceppe:

Doan says all he did was make a sarcastic remark to a teammate, Curtis Joseph, who was infuriated by a penalty call in a game against the Montreal Canadiens.

He says he told Joseph: ''Four French referees in Montreal, Cuje, figure it out.'' And Joseph has backed up his story.

But Duceppe called even that comment unacceptable. He said his party is right to demand answers from Hockey Canada.

''That's what you call racial profiling,'' Duceppe said.

Now that Doan had the ethnic profile of these homer refs, what was he going to do about it? Nothing. Why? Because there was nothing he could do. He's the citizen on the ice and the refs are the cops.

Noticing someone is from Newfoundland because of their accent is not "racial profiling" it's being alive and not deaf. Same thing with someone from Quebec. It would only be possession the power to affect the identified and then the actual taking of action  that would make this observation racial profiling.  This has gotten beyond ridiculous.

The issue dominating Canada's Parliament is the naming of the Captain of Team Canada at the hockey world championships? The Bloc are offended. The NDP are offended. The Liberals are offended. The Tories are offended. Why?

The Bloc Québécois is demanding Shane Doan be removed as captain of Canada's world championship hockey team, in light of the disparaging comments he allegedly made about French Canadians in 2005.

Doan's French Canadian buddies think he's a good choice:

"In the heat of the battle things get said sometimes, a lot worse than being called a French frog or whatever," said Alain Vigneault, coach of the Vancouver Canucks.

"[Doan] says he didn't say it. Even if he did, come on. If our politicians, French or English, if that's the only thing right now they have to worry about....

"There's a lot more important things going on right now in society," Vigneault said. "It is utterly, utterly stupid, not to say embarrassing."

New Jersey goaltender Martin Brodeur had a similar reaction.

"I know Shane really [well] and I don't see him saying that," he said. "All these years in the league I never had a problem with it, so for me to hear that other people had a problem, I have a hard time understanding it."

What were the offending words:

Doan said he was complaining to teammate Curtis Joseph about the officiating, telling the goaltender, "'Four French referees in Montreal, Cuje, figure it out.'

"I would have done the same thing if we were in Los Angeles and it was four officials from California," Doan said Wednesday. "Or if we were in Calgary and it was four westerners."

Oh Dear! Call a Royal Commission:

The Bloc introduced the motion, supported by the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP, demanding that Hockey Canada explain itself to the parliamentary committee.

The NHL cleared Doan of any wrongdoing and the official who made the decision has this to say:

Colin Campbell, the NHL's executive vice-president and director of hockey operations, blasted the politicians for meddling, calling the intrusion "ridiculous.  

"I stand by my original comments after our investigation," Campbell told the Canadian Press. "But I would add to it at this point in time, it's rather embarrassing to all Canadian hockey fans we're rehashing this again, particularly when Hockey Canada and Shane Doan are representing and working hard in Moscow right now, competing for our country. It's ridiculous."

Ridiculous? To call this parliamentary behaviour ridiculous would be an insult to the ridiculous. It reminds me of the uproar over Triumph: The Insult Comic Dog insulting people.

I am offended by Parliament's offence.

(also at The london Fog)

UPDATE: Check out our elected representatives "explaining" their position ... what a pack of clowns. (H/T Small Dead Animals....via Mike at The London Fog)

Another crank, this one with the dubious distinction of being the United States lead hurricane forecaster, says that computer modeling is a flawed way to view climate change...apparently, it's the ocean that is affecting the climate, not mankind:

THE United States' leading hurricane forecaster says global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming.

William Gray, a Colorado State University researcher, also said the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years.

.....

Earlier this month, he dubbed former US vice-president and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore "a gross alarmist" for making the Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which helped focus media attention on global warming.

Yesterday, Dr Gray said that politics and research into global warming had created "almost an industry" that had frightened the public and overwhelmed dissenting voices.

He said research arguing that humans were causing global warming was "mush" based on unreliable computer models that could not possibly take into account the hundreds of factors that influenced the weather.

He said little-understood ocean currents were behind a decades-long warming cycle, and disputed assertions that greenhouse gases could raise global temperatures as much as some scientists predicted.

What does he know? All the real scientists are unanimous in the belief that research money will flow more readily from man-made climate change.

Via Tim Blair: A John Howard speech:

AS A government, no doubt we've made our mistakes. All governments do.

But we have never lost sight of the big things that affect people's lives – jobs, decent healthcare, choice in education and a good social safety net.

We've also never lost sight of the need to strike a balance. That's not the same as always seeking consensus and always looking to please.

Hard choices imply trade-offs. When these are ignored, that's when costly mistakes are made.

Why do I dwell on this? Because my opponent pretends to have discovered a different brand of politics – a politics without hard choices.

Kevin Rudd argues that in this world Australians face one overriding moral challenge: climate change.

Now this is a major priority of the Government. At the same time, we know independent action will not materially affect our climate.

No one – not the IPCC, not Sir Nicholas Stern, not even Al Gore – makes this argument. Australia emits less greenhouse gases in a year than the US or China emit a month.

Do we need to lower carbon emissions over time? Of course we do. But to say climate change is the overwhelming moral challenge for this generation of Australians is misguided at best – misleading at worst.

It de-legitimises other challenges over which we do have significant control, other challenges with moral dimensions just as real and pressing.

Of course, Australia already has an emissions target through to 2012. And unlike many of the European countries that regularly lecture us on this issue, we are on track to meet it.

Any decision on a post-2012 long-term target will be the most important economic decision Australia takes in the next decade. It will affect every industry and every household.

I want to ensure any decision is made in a way that takes full account of jobs and investment in Australia, of climate change action by others and of technology developments.

Australia fully accepts its responsibility. We have committed more than $2 billion to climate change action involving regulation, economic incentives and voluntary measures.

But I will not subcontract our climate policy to the European Union.

Indeed, I worry about the consequences of Mr Rudd's policy of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent from 1990 levels.

Mr Rudd panders to the gesture politics of anti-capitalism. His environment spokesman Peter Garrett once said economic growth "almost always" leads to a worse environment.

Both are wrong. History shows economic growth and technological change have given mankind not just greater material wealth, but also cleaner air and water.

CBC Reports: MPs to vote on motion to take troops from Afghanistan by 2009

A Liberal motion that would ensure Canada end its combat operations in southern Afghanistan by February 2009 is slated to be voted on in the House of Commons Tuesday, but it is not expected to pass.

The NDP is expected to join the Conservatives in defeating the motion, which was introduced by Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre on April 19.

The motion calls on the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to serve notice immediately to NATO that Canada will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in February 2009

Shame on the Liberal Party for their motion to remove Canadian troops by 2009. Playing politics in this realm is dangerous. What will the Taliban take from the vote? If they hang on for a couple of years they will have another run at contoling the country. My question for Dion is what information does he have that the situation will be such as to allow for the safe withdrawl of the troops in 2009. How does he know that the allied forces will not be on the cusp of victory and that a withdrawl will be a set back? How does he know that the troops won't be in the middle of an offensive, from one side or the other and leaving will put our allies in greater danger. How does he know that there will be someone their to take our place ( of course the evil Americans will be there and we know that regardless of the President that they will jump in to pick up our slack)? This cowardice for political gain is sickening.