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Mrs. Dalwhinnie voted separately from me yesterday. Later, she shook her finger at me and swore me to absolute secrecy. Then she allowed as how she had voted Conservative in the Ontario elections.

Given the results of the election, I suspect there have been many many such conversations across Ontario yesterday, as long time Liberals, the indifferent, and the usually non-voting joined the committed Conservatives to crush the Ontario Liberals.

There are several reasons for this defeat. The most significant is the most obvious: after 15 years in power, every party needs to be purged. But in addition the Ontario Liberals were moving  the province in the direction of Venezuela. Oh I grant you it would have taken another fifty years to ruin the place, but intentions count.

Green energy, spending lavishly, ramping up the  debt to absurd levels, green energy, hugely expensive electrical power as a result of subsidizing green energy: you know the drill by now.

It all starts in the excesses of compassion and caring. Let these two forces run without any countering forces for 15 years and you have Ontario. People are being ‘left behind’, and government exists to do something about the left-behinds. So we raise the minimum wage because it is the “right thing to do”. Consequently people whose productivity does not reach $14 an hour are let go, or cannot find work. Compassion, doing the right thing, without any reckoning of practical consequences: that is the Ontario Liberal way.

Also, the planet is being ravaged by the menace of global warming. So green clean energy policies drive us off steady reliable low cost fossil fuels to  forms of energy that blight the countryside and provide rents to friends of the regime  who put up the windmills and charge the taxpayer/ratepayer for grossly inefficiently produced electricity. Double bonus for the Ontario Liberals: you get to posture as greenies and yet provide high-priced contracts to friends of the regime. That you impoverish your province is beyond the point. 75,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost as industry migrates out of the province to Great Lakes states and even [gasp!] Quebec.

When the basic facts of the situation are examined, it is surprising that the Liberals lasted as long as they did. The explanation lies in the long time it takes  for the electorate to draw the right inferences from political crap they don’t read in the papers to their electricity bills to the appropriate conclusions that their government is not working for their interests. In Ontario it took at last a decade.

When I hear a politician talking of compassion and caring, I look for my wallet. I know my money is about to be taken and misspent.

General Zod versus Doug Bozo

For Ontario voters dissatisfied with Ford, Horwath and Wynne, there’s another choice: General Zod

I have been pondering my options this morning.

First the claim that General Zod is less evil than Doug Ford is nonsense. His main attraction is that he promises:

  • mass enslavement
  • smiting of enemies
  • depopulating Toronto
  • killing millions
  • this will be your last vote you ever cast.

This is an exciting program. It calls for the creation of a master class of sadists, prison guards, executioners, extermination camps, and the immiseration of most of the populace. In other words it shows promise from a satanic point of view. Though General Zod claims to be already ruling the world, we know in truth that Satan has this job. So General Zod must be Satan’s lieutenant. So we know he lies. This is a good start.

Doug Ford’s platform includes

  • to change the Municipal Act to strengthen the hand of mayors in running cities, [boring]
  • to lower taxes on minimum wage earners,  [boring]
  • oppose the carbon tax [slightly interesting]
  • repeal sex education curriculum – since kids learn best by porn on the Internet [shows promise]
  • lower corporate taxes [boring]
  • require parental permission if you are a minor seeking an abortion [ho-hum]
  • gut the health care system [not really]

Altogether General Zod’s program shows a spark of imagination, compared to which Doug Bozo Ford looks boringly normal and focused on real-world issues.

 

My old pal Conrad Black recommends Doug Ford for his moderation:

Doug Ford represents frugal but compassionate government, concern for the people but refusal to make a socialist hammock-pitch for their votes. He is not a precise and overly articulate champion of detailed policy, but he can be relied on to do the right and the sensible thing. That cannot be said of his opponents.

Especially General Zod. It is rare that one has a real choice in the election. Lesbian know-it-all Kathy with greemie policies that are ruining us, versus Horwath, the stooge of trade unions and of anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian forces, that would get us to Venezuela faster than lesbian know-it-all, versus a normal white guy, versus General Zod. I say that is a real choice.

I am reining in my deplorable instincts here and voting for Doug Bozo Ford. I hope you will likewise restrain yourselves and vote for Bozo-hood, which will be exciting enough for Ontario.

As Annie Leibowitz [?] once said, fascism is too exciting, communism too boring.

 

Two good pieces from Warren on the state of Canada

David Warren continues to dismay me somewhat with the quality of his writing. Here are two recent pieces on the state of Canada. I am unable to disagree with the overall assessment, though by temperament I am more hopeful. Which is to say that I disagree with his gloominess, though unable to reason why.

Tutti in coda (I)

Canadians thus find themselves in the vanguard of something happening throughout the West, and indeed, around the world. We don’t go out because it’s cold outside. The average Canadian, more than, say, the average Italian, is trapped in a centrally-heated interior. More and more, we live inside our computers. In a larger, cosmic sense we go stir-crazy.

But no revolutionary impulse follows from this. We’ve all come a long way, since 1968. Instead there is a growing disconnexion, from reality in all its known human forms. Canada may be a little more disconnected, but the direction we are travelling from our former orbit is much the same. We have the illusion of being at the front of a social revolution, when really we’re at the back of beyond, merely witnessing our own social dissolution.

Now, add in the evaporation of Christianity, and a further difficulty appears. We are without the moral or spiritual means to make a recovery.

Is it that bad? Sometimes I think so.

University of Alberta defends bad decision on Suzuki

The University of Alberta, and more  particularly its President, David Turpin, is under attack from some of  its professors for choosing to honour that senile gasbag, David Suzuki, who attacks the economics profession and the future prosperity of Canada on the ground of eco-catastrophism. Turpin defended his decision with the usual virtue-signalling twaddle:

“Turpin argued that the promise of an honorary degree to Suzuki cannot be reversed without major negative consequences for the institution’s reputation, which is obviously true. He defended the choice of the award to Suzuki on the grounds that a university cannot avoid controversy. “Instead, we must be its champion. Stifle controversy and you also stifle the pursuit of knowledge, the generation of ideas, and the discovery of new truths.” –Colby Cosh, National Post  

So let us see what stirling defence of freedom and controversy is mounted when Ross McKittrick is honoured with a doctorate for his work in debunking global warming hysteria. There are no honorary doctorates for the likes of McKittrick.

The President of the University of Alberta earned a whopping $824,000 last year. By contrast, the head of the broadcasting and telecommunications regulatory agency for all of Canada might earn about half of that. Salaries that large indicate that university administrators now get economic rents, rather than earn economic value.

The people of Alberta should demand his resignation.

So where is your idolatry of the Supreme Court now, o ye Court Party?

Surely even the idolaters of the Supreme Court of Canada must be having some doubts this morning as to its  inerrancy. It was a classic case of “the way we make decisions is more important than the decisions we make.”

Not merely has the Supreme Court defended interprovincial trade barriers, with all their damaging effects on national wealth generation, and allowed them to be established on the flimsiest of grounds, but it has done so on the basis that the trial judge was a naughty boy for stepping out of judicial precedent to rule in favour of Comeau’s beer buying in the first place.

As the case summary reads:

Common law courts are bound by authoritative precedent. Subject to extraordinary exceptions, a lower court must apply the decisions of higher courts to the facts before it. A legal precedent may be revisited if new legal issues are raised as a consequence of significant developments in the law, or if there is a change in the circumstances or evidence that fundamentally shifts the parameters of the debate. Not only is the exception narrow, it is not a general invitation to reconsider binding authority on the basis of any type of evidence. For a binding precedent from a higher court to be cast aside, the new evidence must fundamentally shift how jurists understand the legal question at issue.

                    This high threshold was not met in this case. The trial judge relied on evidence presented by an historian whom he accepted as an expert. The trial judge accepted the expert’s description of the drafters’ motivations for including s. 121  in the Constitution Act, 1867 , and the expert’s opinion that those motivations drive how s. 121  is to be interpreted. Neither class of evidence constitutes evolving legislative and social facts or a comparable fundamental shift; the evidence is simply a description of historical information and one expert’s assessment of that information. The trial judge’s reliance on the expert’s opinion of the correct interpretation of s. 121  was erroneous. To depart from precedent on the basis of such opinion evidence is to cede the judge’s primary task to an expert. And to rely on such evidence to rebut stare decisis is to substitute one expert’s opinion on domestic law for that expressed by appellate courts in binding judgments. This would introduce the very instability in the law that the principle of stare decisis aims to avoid.

 

Thus for the Supremes the case turns on the use of a historian’s evidence of what the trade provisions of the constitution mean – though at the same time for the past decades the Court seems to bend over backward to listen to the tribal lore of groups of a few hundred Indians to block economic development. “To cede the judge’s primary task to an expert” is the fault which the Supreme Court declares the basis of validating the restrictive trade practices of the provinces that block economic development.

In short, the economic stultification of Canada is defended by a rule that arises internally from the legal profession’s forms of decision making.

So the issue does not turn on an appreciation of the role that provinces play in the blockage of economic development. The Comeau case does not turn on the issue at hand, which is intrerprovincial trade barriers, but on the Court’s concern that nothing be upset by lower court decisions, but hey!, when the Supreme Court invents law out of whole cloth, that is their right and duty.

 

Look at the test the Supreme Court sets out for interprovincial barriers.

….Restriction of cross‑border trade must be the primary purpose of the law, thereby excluding laws enacted for other purposes, such as laws that form rational parts of broader legislative schemes with purposes unrelated to impeding interprovincial trade.

The restriction must only form a rational part of “legislative schemes with purposes unrelated to impeding interprovicnial trade”.

  • This is a bad decision on its merits: it establishes that the flimsiest rationale will suffice to colour a protective scheme that interferes with trade within Canada;
  • It is economically illiterate: it fails to consider the multi-billion dollar question at the core of the issue: the economic  consequences for the Canadian economic union of the law and the courts interfering with economic development.

If ever there was a case of the Court seeing the mote in the other guy’s eye and ignoring the beam in its own, it was the Comeau decision. Let us inhibit economic development for stare decisis. Economic barriers 9- trade freedom 0. How’s that Supreme Court working for ya?

 

Science is superior to native traditional knowledge. And no, I am not sorry.

 

 

Science is a procedure of verifiability, or if you prefer, falsifiability. It is not a racial or cultural trait. If you cannot establish a proposition that is capable of being shown to be untrue it is not science, it is belief, it is conjecture, it is myth, it is “traditional knowledge”

On the other hand, science – by the post modern (racialist) definition – is “white” by accident of being derived from Europe. I am not asserting racial superiority here, but I am asserting that neither Hindu, Islamic or Chinese civilizations managed to develop this form of knowing the world, the one that has produced the greatest improvement of the state of most people in the world in the last 400 years.

In the current environment of insanity, it is dangerous to suggest that there might be conflicts between assertions of traditional knowledge and science. It is a ‘racism of intelligence’.

A Quebec civil servant raised a ruckus when he pointed out that a conflict could arise between science and “traditional aboriginal knowledge”. Bad man! Outrage proceeded from the professionally outraged.

Quoting the National Post article in question:

Bill C-69, which received first reading in the House of Commons on Feb. 8, would require that before a project subject to a federal assessment is approved, “traditional knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of Canada provided with respect to the project” be taken into account — though it provides no definition of “traditional knowledge.” The bill further states that when traditional knowledge is provided in confidence, it “is confidential and must not knowingly be, or be permitted to be, disclosed without written consent.”

A federal law of general application to the assessment of projects would establish, or fail to establish:

  • no definition is given of “traditional knowledge”, and
  • if presented in confidential format, no disclosure of it is required in open court.

The civil servant quite reasonably observed that

“to systematically place Indigenous knowledge on equal footing with scientific data “could prove problematic in cases where Indigenous knowledge and science are found to be in contradiction.” He said criteria should be established to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional knowledge.”

If I were an aboriginal, by these provisions I would be  enabled – for example – to submit to the Court confidentially that the Great Spirit has vouchsafed us a knowledge that He would be wrathful if a pipeline went across our “traditional” territories. It would be “traditional knowledge” if we said it was, and hence its contents would be unverifiable; indeed their contents would be unknown to the parties in the proceeding, they would be undiscussable, and the reasons of the court could not be made available if they relied on it, without written permission of the aboriginal group. So we could have a system of legal review that could not review the reasons for a government decision. A court could not rely on the accuracy or completeness of a record of a proceeding.

Anyone familiar with the trial of Galileo knows that he asserted that the earth went around the sun, that some of the moveable stars, as they were then known, like Jupiter, had their own moons, and that the surface of the moon was pockmarked with craters. The Church held that Aristotle was right, and that these three points were contradicted by the Great Philosopher. Yet in the case of Aristotle, the Church asserted a known, public doctrine.

So the position of the future Galileos in Canadian society is even worse in a way than it was for Galileo. Because you will be brought to trial for offending a traditional doctrine without knowing what that doctrine was, unless the Aboriginal band decided to make it public. To the uncertainty of what will arouse the wrath of Social Justice Warriors will be added secret doctrines, known to the initiates of tribal customs, and unknown to all others.

If you doubt for a moment it will soon be a hate crime to contest traditional knowledge, observe the accusation by the Ottawa law professors against the Quebec civil servant, Mr. Beauchesne, of “racism” for favouring science in a ‘hierarchy of knowledges’.

When I heard Jordan Peterson say that the social constructionist attack on knowledge will soon attack biology for contradicting what the Left says about race, sex, and other biological facts, I thought he might have been extrapolating reasonably. It has become my clear conviction that the days when “white science” will be attacked as racist, sexist, homophobic etc. is already underway.

First they call you a ‘settler’. Then they call you a ‘scientist’.

 

 

 

 

Hey there, Ontario PC Party headquarters!

Everyone seems to think I am a member of the Ontario PC party, everyone, it seems, but party headquarters. I did not get my validation number in the mail, and nor did a friend of mine, who is a heavy-duty insider. Was it the Post Office? Or was I considered deviant? Or have I forgotten to renew my membership? Who knows?

I was sitting at a dining table with a lot of old-stock Ontarians last week. At least half the table were Conservatives, all had voted. Most were for Christine Elliott. I sent her a $100. I have nothing against Caroline Mulroney; I welcome her entry. I would have Doug Ford over for a beer any day, and we would have firm mateship and agreement. What I want, however, is a prime minister of a province who knows the bureaucracy, who can get legislation through parliament, manage the cabinet,  fire the wicked, re-organize as required, mobilize the electorate, and not be too impressed with herself (a pronoun to use in this conjuncture). I do not want someone who has not been in cabinet yet. I want someone who knows how to run a meeting, control the agenda, and talk to the civil servants in such a way that they willingly execute the policies of the new regime. Accordingly, Christine Elliot looked to me like the only one who qualified.

May this evil spawn of Satan, these slow-motion Maduros of the Ontario Liberal Party, suffer in opposition for decades.

Ontario’s newly elected Premier Kathleen Wynne is photographed in her Queen’s Park Office in Toronto on Wednesday June 18, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

 

We are governed by children’s television stars

Bill Nye shows off a Canadian $5 bill, which features an astronaut and the Canadarm as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks on during an armchair discussion highlighting Budget 2018’s investments in Canadian innovation at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 6, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang ORG XMIT: JDT103

Mr. Dress-up is seen with his Chief Science Advisor, Bill Nye, Science Guy, in conversation.

Nye seized the opportunity to challenge Trudeau on his support for the controversial Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion project in Alberta and British Columbia. He said research suggests that Canada could be powered entirely by renewable energy right now, “if you just decided to do it.”

Oh sure, Bill. We could get this kind of policy by people who do not know that solar panels do not work at night, that wind rotors do not turn in the calm of minus 40 temperatures, and who object moreover to the smoke from woodstoves. But sure, yes, we can be powered entirely by renewable energy if we just decided to live at the level of poverty enforced upon North Koreans.

I notice with some satisfaction that Mr. Dress-up’s poll ratings are sinking under the influence of Canadians finally realizing the embarrassment of being governed by children’s drama teacher. In the meantime Mr. Dress-up congratulated his science Minister, Kirsty Duncan, as a Nobel Prize winner because she contributed to the IPCC, the climate change fabulists, which in my view is grounds for being dismissed from any serious position in relation to science.

Science consists of the effort to prove a hypothesis wrong, so as to eliminate error, not the effort to maintain an ideology against all challenges. See articles on climate ‘science’ as groupthink.

 

Aboriginal Representation on Juries

 

The Liberals just cannot help themselves.

There is saying attributed to Jesus that you had better get the beam out of your own eye before you try to extract the mote in someone else’s.

As the federal Liberals threaten to tamper with jury selection, and overthrow centuries of common law to make theft by Indians of property more easily achieved by the disabling the rights of landowners to self-protection, here is something you need to consider. The federal government has stopped making jury lists of Canadian aboriginals, so that finding aboriginals to sit on juries has been made much more difficult. The reasons are given below.

The Department of Indian Affairs stopped compiling jury lists because of privacy concerns. So says the website Lawnow.

Until 2000, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) compiled lists of First Nations persons for jury rolls. These lists were used in the situation where band electoral lists were not available. In 2001, INAC stopped providing band lists because of privacy concerns.  The key issue in the Kokopenace case was the Ontario government’s efforts to address problems that had arisen since the INAC band lists were not available, as this had an impact on the right to a representative jury.

The Ontario courts relied on a report prepared by Justice F. Iacobucci, First Nations Representation on Ontario Juries (2013) for data on why Aboriginal on-reserve residents were reluctant to participate in the jury selection process. Reasons included:

  • their views about conflict resolution;
  • systemic discrimination experienced by First Nations people within the justice system;
  • a lack of knowledge about the justice system and the jury system;
  • the desire by First Nations leaders to assume greater control of justice matters in their communities; and
  • concerns for the protection of privacy rights.

Additional concerns included some aspects of the content of the questionnaire itself (e.g. penalty for non-response) and the requirement to declare citizenship. The Iocabucci Report concluded that the ad hoc system for identifying jurors was ineffective, and thus, results in a jury roll that is unrepresentative of all First Nations peoples on reserve. While the report focused on the situation in Ontario, Justice Iocabucci noted that the problem with underrepresentation of First Nations peoples on juries exists in a number of Canadian provinces, as well as in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

“Privacy concerns”?!

Here we see in action the confusion of legal objectives: “privacy concerns”, which are of distinctly secondary importance, are used to trump the availability of jury lists that could be used to increase the number of Indians on juries, which is, to Liberals, of greater importance.

The decisions cited in the Lawnow article make it clear that a jury is not required to be a random selection of all people, and that failure to achieve statistical representation of the entire community is not a bar to effective justice.

 

The Ontario Court of Appeal emphasized that the right to a representative jury roll is qualified. For example, “it does not require a jury roll in which each group is represented in numbers equivalent to its proportion of the population of the jury as a whole” This would be practically impossible and any attempt to achieve this type of representation would not work with random selection process that is used to choose people to receive jury service notices.

The Ontario Court of Appeal focused on the steps taken by the state to prepare a jury roll that provides a group of people, from which to select a competent and impartial jury. The test arrived at was:

In my view, [wrote the court] to meet its representativeness obligation, the state must make reasonable efforts at each step of creating the jury roll. That includes the state’s actions in compiling the lists, but also in sending the notices, facilitating their delivery and receipt and encouraging the responses to them.  The objective of the state’s actions must be to seek to provide the platform necessary to select an impartial petit jury and to maintain public confidence in the criminal justice system by providing groups that bring distinctive perspectives to the jury process with their fair opportunity to be included in the jury roll.

The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal 5-2.

The Liberals just cannot help themselves.