setUoYouRPROFILE's blog: "tufui"

The shock of the new In which Ottawa fears change on several different fronts. We’re not quite sure why the prospect of Clifford Olson’s death seems to be rekindling a debate about capital punishment in Canada — the Sun Media editorialists want him “hang[ed] before cancer gets to claim him,” but they want to kill all sorts of people,burberry outlet and we don’t really see what one thing has to do with the other. We’re also not sure why they think Russell Williams might have stopped at one murder if Canada had the death penalty. And we’re a bit amazed anyone could write an editorial this week in favour of capital punishment, and of holding a referendum on the subject, without mentioning the unholy mess in Georgia. If anything, support in Canada might have gone down this week. The Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno allows herself a rare moment of smug Canadian superiority when it comes to the death penalty — which, as she says, puts the United States “in league with some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet.” So, if only by default, she believes that “does, indeed, make us a finer and more evolved society.” Except … as she says, when you ask Canadians about it, a majority often say they support capital punishment. We’re not totally sure how to square that circle. The Ottawa Citizen‘s Dan Gardner reminds us that there is literally no evidence underpinning the Conservatives’ crime policies, among other policies, and that their strategists have admitted as much in public. They think you’re stupid, and they’re going to spend billions of your dollars making things worse. “The Harper government is responding to the concerns of Canadians when it comes to crime, and that’s a good thing,” Sun Media’s Brian Lilley counters … without providing any evidence to suggest the policies will work except that “the consensus media populating Parliament Hill” say they won’t, and as we all know, they’re usually wrong. For “most of the 20th century, Canada experimented with a more independent foreign policy,” Rick Salutin writes in the Star. Oh God, here it comes. “Take 1956 …” Argh. Pundits, this has to stop. It’s just not good enough any more to claim Stephen Harper undertook a fundamental realignment of Canadian foreign policy and to cite one half-century-old example of our honest-brokering, peacekeeping past. It’s not that this past was totally bogus. But it was the Liberals who abandoned the peacekeeping role, not the Conservatives: When they took power in 2006, Canadians comprised 0.5% of UN peacekeeping forces. And if anyone realigned ourselves with the great power of the day, as we used to be with Britain — this is Salutin’s view — then surely it was Paul Martin, who sent us to Kandahar. While it might be “theoretically possible” to downsize the federal public service without inflicting serious damage, the Citizen‘s Susan Riley is sure that won’t happen. Rather, it’s “a disaster-in-the-making: impulsive cuts motivated by optics and ideology, with notional savings devoured by new priorities — more prisons, more foreign military interventions and those expensive fighter jets.” It’s interesting, though, that she mentions how piddling the proposed cuts are compared to the Liberals’ in the 1990s. Do Canadians generally remember that as a particularly calamitous time? “It may be [Stephen] Harper’s and [Ted] Byfield’s shared good luck that the latter was no longer putting out a magazine when the former became Prime Minister,” Paul Wells reportsin Maclean’s, on the celebration of Alberta Report‘s 25th anniversary Edmonton. “That way everyone can skip lightly over the way Harper countenances abortion, same-sex marriage, bilingualism, taxpayer money for Bombardier and other apostasies. Now, at least over dinner, they can claim that Harper’s triumph is a victory for By?eld’s values and ask no more questions.”