Order of Canada

Joseph Emmanuel Yvon Levaque has one, and he was founder and first President of the National Association of Principals and Administrators of Indian Residences
(Didn't the government apologize for Residential Schools because they were evil and wrong?)

Cardinal Paul Grégoire (October 24, 1911 – October 30, 1993) was a Canadian Archbishop of Montreal. In 1979, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
(Wasn't he in charge of those Quebec priests who were inappropriate with children?)

Where is the righteous indignation against their OoC's? Just Asking

So who is the parent, again?

So far this week we have a Quebec court overturning the grounding of a 12-year-old girl and a new law that makes spanking illegal. The traditional tools of swift physical punishment and revocation of privileges are being removed.

As a some-time educator, I recognize that positive reinforcement of desired behaviour is a very strong teaching tool, but teaching consequence requires that an appropriate consequence must follow a behaviour. Let us encourage good behaviour, but do not force parents to ignore bad behaviour. These children who have been spared the rod hand and spoiled with no negative feedback for negative behaviour will likely become the miscreants and malcontents of the future. And we will blame the parents for not doing enough.

Maybe Macgyver has some way to make a punishment out of a spatula, some chewing gum, and a pile of bad legislation and judicial rulings. If employing literary devices and fictional characters isn't illegal, yet.

Random application of the Charter

The headline jumped out at me: "Random use of police sniffer dogs breach of Charter: top court"
(http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/04/25/school-search.html)

I read the article and find something vaguely disturbing about it. On one hand, I really enjoy the freedom to wander about and not have to wonder when the police will be searching me and my stuff. On the other hand, if buddy has enough cocaine and heroin in my kid's school to make it obvious she is never going to use it all herself, I don't mind if it gets found in a random search.

So are CheckStops now unconstitutional without a specific warrant?

Canadian Tax Credits for Film

As reported on the CBC (http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2008/04/10/tax-credits.html), Canadian film stars and producers are up-in-arms about the discretionary power to deny tax credits on films that the department deemed inappropriate to be granted to the Heritage Minister by bill C-10.

The descriptions of the bill (I haven't read the actual bill yet...) suggest that we shouldn't be funding "inappropriate" films. The film producers say that they can't make movies with that kind of financial uncertainty hanging over their head.

I think we should probably cut all tax credits for film. We shouldn't be giving gifts to certain industries just to keep them in business. Why should we shield them from risk and let them take all the rewards.

It's not like we do handouts for the farming, cattle, logging, energy, and sporting industries.

Stephen

Three More Years

So, Jeff didn't get elected... he placed 15 out of 16 running (well ahead of 16 I might add). So his campaign is starting now.

Apparently, 22% of Lethbridge stuck its head out, saw something that might resemble progress and now we can expect three more years of the same, old "same, old".

Hurray for majority rule in our democratic society.

Jeff Graham for Lethbridge City Council

The "Jeff Graham says... just vote" campaign is well underway for the 2007 Lethbridge Civic Election. Jeff's website has his contact information (see http://www.jeffgraham.ca/)

The city has its information here http://www.lethbridge.ca/election

Wikipedia has a page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethbridge%2C_Alberta_municipal_election%2C_2007
and I wish that outbound links from candidates names to corresponding websites were not persistently removed as "advertising". Links to url's in support of wikipedia documents are encouraged.

UPDATE!
Having had some discussions on the related discussion page, the outbound linking has been fairly and equitably resolved. Thanks for your hard work, KmSiever!

If democracy is better than other government, why do we need to force people to choose it?

So, I was thinking, it wasn't too long ago that people were concerned with creeping communism and felt that we needed to convince wavering countries that democracy was way better. In fact, many democratic countries used various political, economic, and military means to persuade non-democratic countries to change. If democracy is so great, why do we have to shove it down people's throats?

ditto Communism

and most other -ism's for that matter