Raging Duff

I used to think climate change was a scientific debate.
Then it became a political war of words.
Now I’m convinced it’s a religion.
The Gospel according to Suzuki, the Book of Kyoto, the Psalm of Gore.
Look, I believe we all consume too much.
We eat way too much and pay to little for our food. Most of us are lugging pounds of excess lard, just as everything we buy is wrapped in layers of protection. We drive everywhere, including to the exercise clubs where we work off all those excess calories and try to counter all that inactivity that comes with computers, home theatres and eating out.
Our kids are hyperactive because our school systems have scrapped regular physical activity and nobody has to do chores any more.
Our airlines fly us to third-world countries for our vacations, discharging millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and polyaromatic hydrocarbons into the upper atmosphere where they do the most environmental damage — yet believe it or not, international aviation IS NOT covered by the Kyoto Accord.
We whine about our manufacturing jobs moving to low-wage nations, yet we continue to defend our right to buy cheap goods made in those same countries, where pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are the norm. Who’s getting away with environmental murder? The same transnational corporations who move our jobs and their profits offshore.
And we pretend that somehow, greenhouse gases, ozone-layer degradation and pollution are not our problem. Do we think that they stop at international borders?
Yes climate change is an issue, and yes, mankind is probably having some effect in accelerating that process.
But we’re not going to get a handle on global warming by buying and selling carbon credits.
We can begin by lowering our consumption of everything, by consuming from suppliers closest to home, by recycling, reducing, reusing. By being abstemious. By living in smaller houses, by driving smaller cars, by living with less.
You think that’s a message that will sell?
No wonder climate change has become a battle of beliefs, a war of dogmas. The truth is simply too hard to bear.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What’s it tell you when 70 percent of the respondents to last Friday's Luciani Acura question of the day oppose the $10.5 million hush money payout to Maher Arar?
What’s it say when a Montreal cop pens a ditty mocking reasonable accommodation and achieves instant notoriety? Or the municipal council of some little peafart burg in the Mauricie passes a resolution telling les neo-Québécois to live like them — white, sort of Catholic and French-speaking?
To me, it says the pendulum is swinging away from multiculturalism and all that other homogenized politically correct pap Canadians have been force-fed for the past 30 years.
Here in Quebec, that message has been further customized. Quebec, to hear its various leaders tell it, is a colour-blind multicultural pluralistic society where the common denominator is one of social democracy en français.
In Montreal, maybe. In Quebec City, possibly, but only in the summertime. In the rest of Quebec, in a pig’s ear. Herouxville is unique only in the fact that it was open and blatant in its repudiation of multiculturalism, reasonable accommodation and all that. As we saw with the Journal de Montreal/TVA racism test, les québécois are openly, maybe even proudly racist.
As I listen to Jean Charest denying any such thing, I wonder whether why he bothers. Is it because he has to? Or because he believes it? I sure don’t.
Quebec may be no more or less racist than the rest of Canada, but here, there’s no pretense. The jokes are all about les noirs, les chinois, les juifs, les muselmans, les autres. Heck, I remember when I was growing up, I was le crisse de bloke, le maudit tête carré. Now I have plenty of company.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You may have heard me speaking of Don Chapman and the Lost Canadians.
Born in British Columbia to Canadian parents, Don has a Canadian birth certificate and a B.C. driver’s licence.
But he’s been denied Canadian citizenship because his father, a surgeon, moved to the U.S. sometime between 1947 and 1977. To become an American, Don’s dad had to renounce his Canadian citizenship. That renunciation was applied to his wife and children, because that was the law of the day.
Chapman, a senior United Airlines pilot who has made this issue his hobby, estimates that there are more than 80,000 ‘lost Canadians’ like him, people who were stripped of their citizenship without recourse or process because they were the goods and chattals of their fathers.
Amazingly, that antediluvian law still applies to this day, despite repeated promises from both the Harper Conservatives and the Martin Liberals before that.
Why this foot-dragging? Because the stakes are huge. As a direct result of the American regulation requiring Canadians visiting the U.S. to obtain passports, hundreds of thousands of people who never questioned their Canadian citizenship are discovering they aren’t Canadians.
War brides. Border babies, those kids from border communities who were born in U.S. hospitals because they were closer.
Senator Romeo Dallaire was surprised to discover he wasn’t Canadian. Former GG Adrienne Clarkson’s hubby Stephen Clarkson was a war baby who had to fight for his citizenship.
The ramifications are enormous to public and private pension funds, to public healthcare, to the entire system. No wonder the pols are paralyzed.
This isn’t the failure of any one government. It’s proof of the failure of the democratic system to protect its own.
How can the national media carry on about the rights of dual-citizenship Canadians who use their passports as tickets out of Lebanon or into Somalia, when there are hundreds of thousands of loyal, productive, taxpaying Canadian-born residents of this country who have nobody to fight for them?
If their names wedre Arar or Khadr, you can bet the CBC would be all over this story like flies on crap. But they’re just middle-aged, middle-class white folk, so who gives a damn, right?

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's little to be read or heard about it in the don't-make-waves anglo media, but my franco colleagues are flapping their gums about that supposed FLQ announcement from the self-proclaimed “Cellule Camille Laurin” that I told you about on Monday's DWD.
To summarize, the communique said that because the cell's initial threats of direct action against language-charter scofflaws on Nov. 15 didn’t sow terror into anglo and allo hearts, “the FLQ today announces a change in strategy that will regrettably lead to a toughening of acts in the western end of the island.” The author or authors is now threatening to target what he or she calls important strategic targets — road and highway infrastructures, railways, airports, ports, hydro lines and substations, water filtration systems, shopping centres, etcetera.
Certain businesses particularly stubborn in the use of french will also be targeted, added the two-page comuter-composed doc.
These hits are supposed to begin a month from now, Feb. 15 and continue to March 15.
Maximum impact is sought and it’s possible there will be deaths and injuries. Car bombs, parcel bombs and remotely detonated devices are already in place.
Any municipality which wants to be spared has until Feb. 15 to renounce its bilingual status and undertake an agrressive francization campaign, in conformity with the original Bill101, pre 178, hence the cellule Camille Laurin.
The communique's conclusion: It’s surprising that Esso got the message in four days, while the immigrants we welcome with open arms insult us by insisting on serving us in English. Flee while you have the chance.
•••
Under the English headline "Is this a joke?" La Presse blogger Patrick Lagacé says that was his first reaction. "I’m not afraid of letter boxes," he blogs. "But what I find the most intriguing is that the « cellule Camille-Laurin » has set itself a timetable. If you make promises on such and such a date and you don’t keep them, who will take you seriously?
"The threatened return of the FLQ is like the Bogeyman," Lagacé continues. "He's talked about, but he never shows. Anyway, any sovereignist with half a brain knows that planting bombs would consign the idea of a nation to the land of the dinosaurs. It’s hard to see how making boom-boom in Westmount would advance the OUI in peoples’ minds, unless of course the bombers were barn-burners in a previous life."
(That’s the requisite Quebec-lefty reference to the RCMP burning a barn on the South Shore in the '70s to prevent a supposed meeting between the Black Panthers and the FLQ.)
Lagacé concludes by noting that Fabrice de Pierrebourg in the J de M says the RCMP is investigating.
•••
Lagacé’s bloggees are of the opinion that the communiqué is the work of either the RCMP or the Dion Liberals, a dirty trick to discredit the secessionist movement.
I’ll take it a step further. I think this is a indepandantiste conspiracy to make Quebeckers believe this is another dirty federalist trick.
And they think I'm a conspiracy theorist?

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Does the fact that the oil companies decided to add a 1.3 cent a litre surtax to the price at the pump in anticipation of a green tax that the Charest government had not even decided on, constitute a conspiracy to fix prices?
On Saturday, an oil-industry executive quoted in La Presse said that the industry had decided together to begin collecting the 1.3 cent surtax in the event that Quebec decided to make it retroactive. That was enough for lawyers representing Catherine Savoie, the plaintiff of record in today’s request for permission to proceed with a class-action lawsuit filed in Quebec Superior Court against Petro-Canada, Shell Canada, Ultramar and Imperial Oil.
It’s now up to a judge to decide whether Savoie’s case has merit and who should be allowed to join the class of plaintiffs in the action.
The motion alleges that the Big Four conspired illegally to raise the price of their product under the pretext that they needed to prepare themselves for the eventuality that Quebec would impose its 1.3-cent-a-litre Green Tax — a tax that may never be collected.
This collusion, this price-fixing — because that is what Savoie’s suit alleges — supposedly began on or about January 1, two weeks after the Charest government adopted its energy-strategy legislation, one of four bills rammed through by closure prior to the end of the current National Assembly session.
The lawsuit points out that the government has not yet adopted the regulations necessary to administer, calculate and collect the tax from the oil companies, yet they went ahead and began collecting the surtax anyway.
“The oil companies acted in a concerted fashion to ensure that the surtax would be passed uniformly onto their clients,” today’s motion notes. The alleged collusion permitted the four firms to collect an additional $5 million a week, according to estimates by lawyer Philippe Trudel.
If what the lawsuit alleges is true — and again, it’s up to the judge to assess the veracity of the claim — it tells us several things.
— There is a communications structure at the seniormost levels of the oil industry’s biggest players that allows them to discuss issues of common concern and make decisions at what, in the corporate world, is lightnig speed. We’re talking less than two weeks here — at Christmas.
— That the Charest government may even have been aware of what the oil industry was planning when it rammed that bill through closure.
This isn’t a matter for a lawsuit. This is an allegation of a criminal conspiracy similar to the one that set sugar prices 20 years ago. This should be investigated by a public inquiry of the magnitude of Gomery, with subpoena powers. But it won;t be, because governments are the willing participants in the ongoing act of rape by Big Oil perpetrated on the consumer.
Oil is below 54 dollars a barrel and heading down. Gas prices are hovering at the dollar level and headed up. What part of collusion, price-fixing and gouging don’t the legislators understand?

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Frédéric Dompierre pled guilty in the Palace of Injustice in Longueuil this morning to seven more charges — three of sexual aggression against girls under 14, three of breaking bail conditions and one of car theft. It may be the cheapest way for this piece of filth to do whatever time he’s sentenced to for these charges, because he’s already serving 11 years for the rape and attempted murder of a 14-year-old in a Ste Catherine riverside park in November, 2003.
You’ll remember Dompierre when you hear the story. He and another loser, Steve Lapointe, held this girl against her will, raped her repeatedly, beat her over the head with a boulder and tried to drown her. She escaped by swimming to a tiny offshore island in the St. Lawrence, then made her way to a riverside house to get help.
Dompierre and Lapointe were arrested, tried and sentenced in December, 2005, Dompierre to 11 years and Lapointe to seven.
These latest charges were for crimes Dompierre committed between June and November, 2003, prior to the attack that sent him to prison. Two of his victims were 13, below the legal age of consent, while the third was 12.
Here’s the part I can’t understand. The Crown suggested three years for these other crimes, to be served concurrently with his 11 years for the rape and attempted murder.
Dompierre spent two years awaiting trial. That counts as four. Not even murderers serve more than half their sentences first time around, so he’ll be out in 18 months if these latest charges don’t add more time to the clock.
Judge Denys Noel was supposed to decide this afternoon whether to accept the Crown’s offer to make his own decision. If there’s such a thing as justice in Quebec, Dompierre would do every second of those 14 years. Where's the justice in this?

Posted by Jim Duff at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The opposition will call it a fence-mending pre-election, deckchairs-on-the-Titanic reassigning of meaningless ministerial functions in a micromanaged cabinet, but Stephen Harper accomplished what most Canadian prime ministers only dream of — a hassle-free shuffle.
Nobody lost their limo. Nobody was taken out behind the woodshed. There was no anonymous grumbling or whining. In fact, a bunch of small fry were blessed with junior cabinet posts.
More to the point, the media were dead wrong in their assessments of the political futures of Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor and Commerce Minister David Emerson. Neither, it seems, is going anywhere, at least for the time being.
First, the major movements: Ottawa-area pitbull John Baird, the one guy Stephen Harper wishes he was like, moves from Treasury Board to Environment. The same Baird who chainsawed the opposition to move the Accountability Act through the House and the Senate, now has to react to the growing climate-change hysteria occasioned by monsoons and typhoons in western Canada and British Columbian weather here in the east.
Former Environment minister Rona Ambrose gets Intergovernmental Affairs. She should feel right at home with that, seeing as how it was her portfolio when she was one of Ralphie Klein’s deputy ministers back in Alberta. Klein meddled and Harper himself handles all dealings with Quebec, so Ambrose gets to keep the limo without any heavy lifting.
Justice Minister Vic Toews is bumped to the Treasury Board, where the dirty work has already been done. He’s replaced by Mr. Nice Guy House Leader Rob Nicholson, who I have no doubt will immediately back away from the perception that the Harper gang would like to jail 12-year-olds.
Peter Van Loan, who inherited Intergovernmental Affairs when Michael Chong quit over that Quebec-is-a-nation nonsense last fall, replaces Nicholson as House Leader.
One interesting little switcheroo: Immigration Minister Monte Solberg switches seats with Human Resources Minister Diane Finley. Could this be the reaction we’ve been waiting for to the dual-citizenship fiasco witnessed during last summer’s Lebanese evacuation?
Other motion in the backfield:
Jay Hill is now a Secretary of State and the government’s chief whip.
Jason Kenney, Harper’s parliamentary body double, is now Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity.
Another Quebec City area MP, Christian Paradis, is now secretary of State for Agriculture.
Helena Guergis is now Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Commerce, where she’ll be able to lend a helping hand to the flailing Josée Verner.
Garry Ritz alother Canadian Alliance lad from the Prairies, is now the Secretary of State for small business and tourism.

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

To borrow a cliché from Michael Ignatieff, I lost no sleep over the execution of Saddam Hussein by a Shiite lynch mob in the dying days of 2006.
Nor do I really care whether his last moments were spent exchanging taunts with his masked executioners, or whether he danced the Devil’s Hornpipe in front of unauthorized cellphone cameras.
I’ve declined the opportunity to view those clips on the web because I don’t feel a need to see them. In the course of 40 years in this business, I’ve seen people shot, blown up, drowned or otherwise dispatched and I’m not curious.
Nor do I fret about impressionable youngsters coming across this gruesome scene. Why should we protect our kids from the sight of real death, when we allow them to partake of the most heinous video games and watch Hollywood’s gratuitously violent offerings? Is the average 10-year-old Sudanese, Iraqi or Afghan kid any more desensitized to killing because it’s the real thing?
Give me a break.
Our hypocrisy lies in supporting the death penalty until we actually see it carried out, so it’s only natural that we would be outraged that Saddam’s demise was stripped of the pretense and ceremonial trappings of a state execution. We wanted the dictator’s execution filled with pomp and significance. Measured, solemn, funereal. Not this hate-filled spectacle, like a pack of dogs closing in on a cat. Until Canada declared a moratorium on the death penalty in the ‘60s, we used to send journalists to witness executions. As a Calgary Herald reporter, my father witnessed one of this nation’s last hangings; it left him a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. Like many Canadians, I’m torn between wanting to see monsters like Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka tortured to death and worrying about executing the wrongfully convicted.
If anyone deserved to die for crimes against humanity, it was Saddam. But his trial was a travesty, a kangaroo court that made mockery of the Coalition of the Willing’s pretext that this was justice being meted out. As we’ve seen before, the Americans talk a big game, but have no stomach for the wet work that goes with regime change. What was to prevent someone slipping the murderous geezer a lethal dose of whatever? Why is it okay to drop a bunker-buster bomb on a quiet neighbourhood in the off chance that Saddam might have been there, but not okay to slip him a lethal mickey? I’m unclear on the dichotomy, as I’m sure many are. Other major powers, from Vlad Putin in Russia to the Israel’s IDF, have no problem with targeted killings and as the Americans demonstrated at the outset of the latest Iraq war, they have no qualms about collateral victims.
Let’s be honest: Many thousands died under the cruel fist of his Baathist regime, but Saddam’s biggest failing was in declaring war on a British/American oil ally, then losing.
The case against the Butcher of Baghdad was tediously similar to the cases that the world’s court of sectarian outrage has failed to make against a variety of dictators and despots of recent memory, including such luminaries as Pol Pot, Baby Doc Duvalier, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin and other psychopathic national leaders who died in their beds. As evil as Saddam’s regime may have been, how was it any worse than that of the Khmer Rouge?
And to think that the Americans are now back to being pals with Libya’s maniacal Khaddafi. Oh, that’s right — Libya has oil!
A year ago, I asked Stephane Bourgon, a Canadian who is part of the defence team at the International War Crimes Tribunal in Le Hague, whether dictators like Saddam or former Serbian president Slobodan Milosovic could ever receive what we like to think is a fair trail. Bourgon said the fundamental problem is that losers are tried by the winners. Pinochet headed a military junta that murdered thousands, but he had the support of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who argued that if Britain allowed the Chilean despot to be tried for war crimes, no western leader would be safe from similar prosecution.
Saddam’s big mistake wasn’t in killing and murdering thousands of his countrymen, but in turning on his former allies. Even then, we recoil at the undignified way he was killed. Like they say, most of us would be vegans if we had to slaughter our own meat.

Posted by Jim Duff at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I'm driving downtown on the 20 to pick up my daughter for a family New Year's supper, when something comes skittering into my lane from the fast lane and BANG! my right front tire goes flat instantly. I'm in heavy traffic just east of the Mercier Bridge exit, but it's just crawling, so I figure I'll pull over on the straight stretch before the St. Jacques exit. That's when I see another poor sod pulled over, his blinkers on, so I pull around him and wait for the cops. I figure we're less likely to be tail-ended if there are two of us.
The SQ is there within 15 minutes. The constable wants to know whether I want to file an accident report. Damn right I do! Anything to get this on the record. While we wait for the Burstall-Conrad tow truck (it's one of those tow-zone exclusive contracts, so I'm not even allowed to fix my own tire) I get to talking to my fellow accident victim, a young man from the same small town as I am. Like me, he hit something that skittered across the 20, blew his tire and pooched his rim. He has no cash for the tow truck, so he'll have to detour — at his cost — past a bank machine to withdraw the $120 it will cost to get his car off that pieceofcrap highway.
Eventually the tow truck shows, but he can't manoeuvre to load us with the traffic, so we have to wait another 20 minutes for the Voirie patrol truck with the flashing arrow. Only then can the driver load me for the trip to the nearest garage. Yes, it was wishful thinking on my part, but I actually thought that on the Saturday before New Year's, the Canadian Tire on St. Jacques might put me up on one of their lifts long enough to replace the wrecked wheel with that crappy little spare that seems to be standard issue these days.
No way, says the Canadian Tire minion. We're booked and our insurance says you're not allowed to so much as check your own tire pressure inside our workbays. Besides, we close at 5 and we have to finish all these cars.
So that's how I got to test out the toy jack and the patented flesh-ripping lugnut wrench and the rest of my tire-changing kit in the parking lot of the Canadian Tire. Good thing it was just around freezing out, because what with all this mild weather, I'd gotten out of the glove habit. Besides, I needed to shiver off a few pounds.
As I worked, the words of the friendly Burstall-Conrad tow truck driver rang in my ears.
"I see this all the time, happening to people who can't afford the tow or the time or the repairs. And when they try suing Transport Quebec, they find out that the law doesn't let them. At least your rim is repairable."
In light of that governmental abdication of responsibility, it's no wonder we feel so little allegiance to the state — and less and less loyalty to big-box corporate entities that don't care if we freeze while changing our tires.

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Like 20-year-olds who still believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, there are still Canadians who believe that the healthcare system is basically the same as when Tommy Douglas proselytized for public health insurance. Politicians excepted, of course, because if they admitted that public health insurance is as dead as last week's Christmas turkey, they'd have to do something about it.
How dead is it? Let me share with you a little story:
Several weeks back, someone I know was experiencing one of those middle-aged male problems having to do with a small walnut-shaped gland located somewhere between here and there. (Okay, it was me, but let's not make it personal.) Time to see a specialist.
But there's a problem. I don't have a family doctor and the local clinic is out of the question because I hate waiting three hours for someone who will take precisely 3.4 minutes to listen to my symptoms and prescribe a series of tests that will take us well into January. Hey, it could be serious, right?
So I remember this pamphlet Louise picked up at the doctor's the other week. It's for a service that buys fast access to a specialist. $300 gets me in to see a urologist within 72 hours of my call, plus a followup call to ensure that I'm entirely satisfied. The urologist dons the glove, probes the walnut and I'm outa there with a prescription and an appointment as soon as the medication is finished. Hot damn!
That's two-tier medicine. The poor goober who can't or won't come up with the $300 will be sitting on his enlarged prostate months from now, long after he should have been seen. And the system can't even guaranteee him a timely followup.
Is it wrong to jump the queue? No more than it is to do anything else for one's self-preservation. I'll be damned if I'll let healthcare bureaucrats dictate anything to do with my personal health, which is precisely what the Supreme Court of Canada said when it found for Dr. Jacques Chaouli and his patient last year.
Our healthcare system is all about rationing services. Anyone who thinks the VIPs, politicians and their families aren't regularly jumping the line is an idiot and anyone in a position of power or responsibility that denounces two-tier medicine is a hypocrite. Let the private sector set the standards for a new public healthcare protocol, so that we have an effective cost-per-patient yardstick with which to beat the incompetent bureaucrats, self-serving unions and the two-faced elected officials who pretend that rationing healthcare is normal.
I don't confess to using private medicine, but neither do I boast about it. As for the cost, I happen to place a healthy prostate ahead of a plasma television on my list of personal priorities. Surely that's a choice that all Canadians should be allowed to make.

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)