He knows it sucks too

A true Canadian...



~

Pick me! Pick me!

I believe in gender stereotypes!

The titanic arrogance and impenetrable wall of assumptions behind this headline simply boggle the mind.

Gender stereotypes persist among young Canadians

[Plan Canada surveyed] 1,000 Canadian youth between the ages of 12 and 17.

They found that while 91 per cent felt that equality between men and women in Canada is good for both boys and girls, some youth still subscribed to gender stereotypes. For example:

* 48 per cent of the youth thought men should be responsible for earning income and providing for the family
* 31 per cent of the boys felt that a woman's most important role is to take care of her home and cook for the family.

I wonder if they took the trouble to define any terms.

I don't doubt that the survey simply asked, "Do you think that equality between men and women is good for both boys and girls". In my experience, surveys of this kind are no more sophisticated than online newspaper polls. So I don't doubt that there was no attempt to define "equality".

But the concept "equality," like it's in-bred idiot cousin "human rights," can mean a lot of different things, and since it has become the primary operating concept in Canadian government, it might be helpful for someone to actually define it.

Because it is not defined, "equality" has become not a concept in political philosophy or economic theory, but an essentially meaningless noise, one of those words that Chairman Mao described as a "little stick of dynamite you plant in people's minds". Effectively, it has become a kind of battering ram to knock in the doors of many moral social bastions. No one wants to be thought to be against "equality," so whenever some feminist (or increasingly often, homosexualist,) government bureaucrat in Canada, Britain, the UN or the EU starts slinging it, everyone ducks and covers.

But let's ask a few concrete questions. What does "equality between men and women" mean, exactly? Does it mean that a woman's testimony in court is held to be as reliable as a man's? Does it mean that in criminal cases, the same rules of evidence apply to men as to women? Does it mean that a woman doing a job, say a Toronto bus driver, receives the same pay and is taxed at the same basic rate as a man doing the same job?

Few people realise that most of these kinds of things were already covered in British Common Law long before the Great Emancipation.

But now, "equality" as the holy grail of all government policies, is wielded like a blunt instrument, mostly to make the lives of small businessmen miserable.

Here's an example.

In the Canadian bureaucracy, at all levels, it has been held to equate with the fictitious concept, "equal pay for equal work". The slogan that feminists used in the Canadian government is actually more accurately given as "equal pay for work of equal value". A lot of people assume that this means "the same pay for the same work," as in, you pay a female bus driver the same as a male bus driver if she does the same job and works the same hours.

But in fact, the slogan, which has become the government's operating policy, is a byzantine labyrinth of Official Feminist socialist doublethink that attempts to weigh the value of work done and arbitrarily assigns a job a dollar number that must be met by employers.

This little bit of socialist interference in business has been enshrined in Canadian law at several levels, such as the Ontario Employment Standards Act and there are real consequences for employers failing to govern themselves according to it.

As Real Women of Canada puts it: The "equal pay for work of equal value" slogan/policy

would include the problem of evaluating different jobs having very different factors, such as job risks, uncertain tenure, working conditions, training, etc. There is no objective way to measure the value of a job apart from the price it commands on the market. Once market wages are abandoned as a guide, the system, unfortunately, becomes a subjective assignment of points based on the bias of the evaluator about the relative value of working conditions, job skills, education, training and responsibility.

Of course, most Canadians, including doubtless the boys and girls surveyed by Plan Canada, know nothing about this. Being fair-minded people in general, the first assumption is probably the one everyone makes, that "equality" is a good thing and the idea of defining it has never crossed any of their minds.

But the survey above is an interesting indicator. On the vague, undefined notion of "equality between men and women," everyone surveyed (remembering that these are just kids) snapped to attention and saluted, like the good little Canuckistanis they have been brainwashed to be. But when the survey asked some questions about something real, like whether a woman should go out to work or look after things on the home front, they were able to break their coding and nearly half of them answered honestly.

It gives one a ray of hope, don't you think?



~

Why Canadians ought to go extinct

Aaaaand this year's Darwin Award goes to

THE ENTIRE COUTRY !!!

Let's give a big hand to the country that sends its bear taggers out to tag bears equipped with a Snow. Shovel.

I have some friends in Toronto, people who are otherwise highly competent and intelligent ... advanced degrees in really hard, grown-up, guy stuff like electrical engineering...who go canoeing in Northern Ontario...yes, Land 'O Bears...

Without. A. Gun.

And yes, they were stalked by a bear. A big scary, meat-eating wild animal.

I asked, "Did you leave your gun in the canoe? Is that why you were so scared?"

I got a blank look, "Gun?"

GAH!



~

This irritates me

Dorothy was posting about the reaction of some English and Scots to her Toronto accent, and I tried to post the following as a comment, but for some reason the commbox thing wasn't working.

There is one thing about all this that most people forget, even Canadians. There is no such thing as a "Canadian accent" or I should say, "the" Canadian accent.

The weird hootings that made up the mockery of the putatively Canadian accent were completely incomprehensible to me when they appeared in the mid 1980s on that silly show...what was it called? Not Wayne's World, but that other stupid thing with the two guys and the beer. Anyway, people all of a sudden started claiming that Canadians all talked this "aboot" business and said "eh", and for the life of me, I could not figure out what they were all blithering about. No one in my entire life had ever spoken that way in my presence.

It was not until many years later that I came to Ontario and began to understand. Most Americans, (and Brits, for that matter) assume that the "Canadian" accent is that of a small pocket of the popuation with whom they are most familiar: to wit, Southwestern Ontario. I had never in my life heard anyone talk like that (the way the "Canadian" accent was suddenly being depicted on American television shows) until I went to Southwestern Ontario... and suddenly it all became clear. The SW Ontario accent is indeed heavily influenced by the Scots who administered the place (Calvinist presbies all, and virulently anti-Catholic, btw).

I have something that is extremely rare: a native Victorian accent. I was raised, as were most of my contemporaries, by first time English immigrants in a colonial town almost completely isolated from the outside world. No one came to Victoria in the 1960s and '70s .... except American tourists up on the ferry from Seattle.

Victoria was a sleepy little place with a lot of old ladies in flowered hats and near-parodic English colonial types, all somehow overlooked by the modern world since circa WWI. I therefore sound "English" to the Canadians, and even some of my English relatives said that I spoke near enough with an English (though not London or Cheshire) accent that they didn't mind.

I also went to live for four years in the Maritimes and have spent some time in northern Quebec and New Brunswick, where even when they are speaking English, you can't tell. In Mirimichi the country people speak with a weird combination of Irish, French and Cree or Algonquin... dear heavens!

I do wish the rest of the world would get their collective heads out of their derriers about Canada. The county is HUGE. English people have no conception of a place that takes a week to drive across (without any overnight breaks). I once calculated the equivalent distance, and it is about that between London and Burma.

The regional differences are equally vast because the different waves of immigrants came and settled in groups in different parts of the country and usually in different centuries.

This idiotic thing with "aboot" and "eh" just infuriates me.

Only Canadians know how properly to Mock Canada

Too little; too late

ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Oh, sorry... Did someone mention "Canadian identity"?


H/T to Kathy
(who is clearly spending more time in commboxes than
is probably strictly good for her).

All the choice in the world,

...unless you disagree with us.

At least they said 'please'. So very Canadian.

Every now and then,

I like to re-view the Ezra Tapes

reminds me of why I keep doing all this.

And for my next trick...

I have just heard that the Canadian bishops, in their "God-given authority" can change external reality.

Stop looking at me like that. Of course I'm not kidding.

We have it from the president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops himself, so you know it must be true.

Archbishop James Weisgerber, the President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has said, unequivocally, that there is "no evidence" that the groups that D&P is funding around the world are plumping to legalise abortion.

...Except for all the, you know,

evidence, an' stuff..

But Bishop Weisgerber wants to let us know that these so-called "facts" are just the machinations of "websites" who have no, ABSOLUTELY NO, authority in the Church to judge these matters.

None.

Nada.

Nowt.

How do they know this, I can hear you asking?

Well, it's because it's their Role In The Church, and when they've decided, according to Their Theology, that D&P isn't funding pro-abortion advocacy in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, etc, well, that's just that. They've judged it, see. According to their theology.

“That’s the role of the bishops in the Church and when the bishops investigate something, when the bishops look at things and when the bishops teach, according to our theology, we should have confidence in that.”

And for their next trick, they're going to use their God-given authority, according to Their Theology, to change the weather, sunspots and the phases of the moon.

“We can assure you that none of the money was spent to promote abortion, nor for support of abortion with the funds of Development and Peace.”

So there.
Don't you feel better? You've been "assured".

There are always problems when people trust the evidence before their eyes more than the God-given authority of the Bishops. That's been the problem in the Church for the last forty years.

“It seems that there is a tendency on the part of some people to trust allegations on websites more than they trust the bishops."

Can't imagine why.

And we've als been assured that the bishops know everything there is to know about where the (your) money is going. Have known in detail all along.


A spokesman for the CCCB, Wanda Potrykus, said,

"Any thing we allocate money to, we have written reports that have to be submitted showing how the money was spent and whether it was spent as it was intended."

There now. Stop worrying and back to the Spirituality of the Tree workshop.

And another damn thing...

We never said that D&P is obliged only to work with groups whose "values" we share.

"It is also very clear from the direction given by Pope John XXIII and by the (Second Vatican) Council that the church is to work with other people, but not, in a sense, blindly," he said. "We have to work with people whose values we are not necessarily in agreement with."

Sheesh. Get with the programme. It's the Time of the Laity. The New Springtime. The time of "opening" to the world, doncha know. Good Pope John said it, an' he was the Pope and everything.

And besides, Vatican II said so, so nyah.


Our annual Bucket and Spade award goes to Bishop W and the CCCB.

Keep digging that hole boys. You'll find the bottom eventually.

A portrait of Canadian "Catholicism"

What, as John Sonnen likes to say, is wrong with this picture?

A Canadian organisation for women, that shall remain nameless, had this to say about its annual meeting:

“Love One another in the Heart of the Universe”: our development day theme was presented by two passionate, visionary speakers, D___ R____ and S___ V____ and their enthusiastic team. This faith experience began with a meditative, multi media presentation of the creation story and highlighted our role as Catholic women in preserving our environment.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce

Some HRC cases have been in the works for 20 years.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable old people have died out of it... The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.

Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

I kind of miss this stuff about the HRCs in Canada

Being now officially a member of the Eurotrash demographic, it just doesn't seem like my fight any more. But it's still pretty fun to watch from a distance. A bit like whales that way.

Anyway, if there is anyone left in the 'sphere who hasn't seen Ezra's take-down of that HRC toady...oh...what'shername...I can't remember...but in case you are the last one to know, here's the link to the greatest scolding a Sane Person ever gave to the Newfangled Left.


http://www.youtube.com/user/EzraILevant

I don't know if there is anyone after that who might still be wondering what the deal is with the HRCs, but in case you are,

Blazing will explain it all to you:

...the Left draws most of its motivating energy from imaginary problems, like global warming, DDT, backalley coathanger abortions, and the chronic boredome of American housewives in 1950s suburbia. The Left is very concerned about something they like to call “social justice”, which I define as the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems.

...

Today, gay Canadians outnumber Muslim Canadians; when that balance shifts, and it will for obvious reasons, it will be interesting to see which side Canada’s liberal establishment decides to take, or is obliged to.

[Oh me too!]

"...the HRCs are engaged in class warfare. The majority of “hate speech” cases are brought by highly educated, highly privileged white liberals -- against less educated, working class, blue collar “reactionary” whites, who insist on speaking to each other about topics like immigration, using old fashioned, politically incorrect language.

I was pleasantly surprised that Ken Whyte and his crew fought back because, well, they’re Canadians. To continue the metaphor, I’ve often said that had United 93 been an Air Canada flight, the passengers would have held the cockpit door open for the terrorists -- then said “sorry” when they stepped on their feet.

Ezra likes to say that the HRCs and Section 13 are “unCanadian.” I respectfully disagree. I can’t think of anything more Canadian. They perfectly embody the Trudeaupian, Centennial celebration Canada I was born into.

Yep.

I am just, barely, old enough to remember when all this stuff started but not quite old enough to have known what Canada was before it was put through the Trudeaupian Presto-Change-O Commie Transmogrifier. I remember the process by which it was changed, both at the national level by legislation and at the local level by hippies going to their little GestaltDreamTherapyPrimalScreamGroupHug workshops. I remember being used as part of that great experiment (gotta get to the kids right?). But I never got to see the Before Time.

But I know people who remember. And what strikes me is that when they talk about it, it is clear they are talking about something Real, about something that concerns itself with the Real. What strikes me about Canuckistan, and about our whole Mirror Universe civilisation (in Britain, Europe, Massachusetts, Oregon, etc.,) that started at the Big Bang of 1968, is that it concerns itself with nothing real. It is devoted to unreality. Its language is made up of unwords. It's politics is about imaginary grievances, and its history is make-believe history. It is as if the deadly hypnotism that addled the pates of my mother's hippie/feminist friends in 1972, had leaked out into the real, transforming it into the strange landscape of their drug-induced fantasies.

Lies. All lies!

Except for the part about all Canadians being totally gay.

That's true.

It's always the pelvic issues isn't it?

Fr. Tim could have written precisely the same comment about the Canadian Catholic bishops. He has been doing a little digging into the back issues and has discovered the precise moment of their lapsation.

The "definitive break" made by the Tablet newspaper/magazine from the teachings of the Catholic Church came in...


wait for it...


1968.

Can you guess what "issue" the Tablet and the Canadian hierarchy have in common?

They both abandoned the Holy Catholic Faith in the same year for the same reason.

And I am sure I'm not the only one to have noticed what I have called the "bleed out" effect. Once a body of the Catholic Church, whether a 150 year-old Catholic newspaper or a national hierarchy, has repudiated the Faith on one specific point, the apostasy bleeds out into the rest of the teachings. The original point of departure may have been birth control, and there may have been a feeling, as there probably still is, that there could be "dissent" from the Faith on that one but loyalty in all other respects, but heresy and apostasy is like a virus. It may start in one single cell, but it won't stop there.

I read my way into the Catholic Faith. I started at 17, with all the same loathing that so many of my contemporaries take as read. I had, however, an idea that something must be true and I determined to find out what that was. I started reading, more or less randomly, and examining what the Church had to say for itself. I was about five years into this project when I remember realising that everything the Catholic Church teaches depends upon everything else. Contrary to what the Church's internal enemies have proposed, the nature of the thing is such that it is impossible to choose which bits you like and chuck the rest. This interconnectedness made the Catholic Faith an all-or-nothing proposal.

After that it was all downhill.

Prendergast on sins that need atoning for

What he said at the Senate Committee hearing, (that some of you might remember) is still up there with the worst personal betrayals I have ever experienced, and I will not now or ever forgive him for it,

but I thought this is pretty good,

This year marks the fortieth year since the introduction into legislation in our country of the 1969 Omnibus Bill, which effectively led to opening the door to abortion on demand in Canada. What a tragic loss it has been to our country of the hundreds of thousands, the millions of souls who have never been given the chance to see the light of day! Now some might be tempted to see in these spiritual activities an attempt to justify ourselves and somehow, by our individual efforts, to bring about the goal we seek. And that is why the text of St. Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians is our guide in terms of how to understand what we are about. We recall that God has already effected our reconciliation; God has already in his sovereign will made peace with all of sinful humanity. Our task is merely to say “yes” to this and to let ourselves be caught up in God’s saving dynamic. What Paul is saying is that herein lies God’s message: “Just let yourselves be reconciled to me: let what I have done for you in my Son Jesus’ death and resurrection become effective in your lives.”

...you know, for a Canadian bishop.

Ground floor fascista opportunity

Binky gives us our daily early morning yell of horror and despair:

Back in the day, we were beaten up and beat others up at school; got detentions, punishments, and the rest; snow-ball fights, roughhousing, spankings at home...We turned out (most of us) not simply despite but because of the reality and consequences.
For the last 20 years, it’s become all about diversity-training, sensitivity, bully-free zones, friendly-words, peer mediation, expulsion for snowballs or name-calling: and so
we have spoiled junior tinpot fascists by the time they get to College? What the heck? Is that what our society has taught such kids? That if we are going to have a soft-fascist system, get in on it while the getting’s good?

But of course, the disease is not confined to Canuckistan; it's everywhere and probably much worse in Europe, though I must say, mostly in the colder, more heavily protestantized parts. One of the things one notices instantly upon arriving in Italy is how much less of that particular creeping morbidity there is here than, say, in Britain...where Logres is no more.

Election Snoozies

It looks like a lot of us just kind of forgot there was an election on yesterday. And not all of them live on other continents:

Kathy:

I watched some of the coverage, but wow: politics really is show biz for ugly people. Arnie and I mostly made fun of people's hairdos without really listening to the returns. And Canadian media are still using giant black headphones and stuff that look like they got them at a USSR tv studio rummage sale.

I decided my time was better spent watching The Gene Krupa Story for the third time.

It doesn't matter to me who rules the nation. I plan to carry on as I have been, violating Section 13 and thus rendering it unenforcable through attrition.

Rick McGinnis:

Did you know...?

what they've done with the former home of the Canadian War Museum?

That's right - the "Global Centre for Pluralism," which "seeks to assist the creation of successful societies and was founded on the premise that tolerance, openness and understanding towards the cultures, social structures, values and faiths of other peoples are now essential to the survival of an interdependent world."

Kathy comments: "That pretty much says it all, I think."


The Steyn:

reminisces about when Canadian elections were at least good for a laugh.

But, after the last couple of months, nuts to that. Mr. Martin went out in as graceless and classless a way as possible, presiding over a scorched earth campaign strategy whose viciousness was matched only by its witlessness. By the end, he seemed almost literally unhinged, his arms swinging loose, flailing wildly as he denounced Stephen Harper for an "extreme right-wing agenda." When you asked him to name specific examples of the extreme right-wingery, he'd cite the Tories' opposition to Kyoto or same-sex marriage. Three years ago, Mr. Martin was supposedly opposed to same-sex marriage and shared Mr. Harper's reservations about Kyoto. Was Paul an extreme right-winger back then?

Heigh-ho, even if he was, by January 2006 environmentally friendly gay nuptials had been added to the Trudeaupian roll call of eternal "Canadian values" and Mr. Martin was all that stood between them and the neocon Bush stooge Harper's destruction thereof. As they say at Canada Steamship Lines, any port in a storm or when tax time nears, and Cap'n Paul was running up flags of convenience on an almost daily basis.

I think what this election needed was a few outrageous attack ads. Remember those really hilarious ones put out by the Libs last time? And the attack ad parodies. Man that was a good time.


John Carriere also finds little to add to previous elections commentary...

...by republishing my comment on the last provincial election. Although this election is federal, I find it applies.

The Party of Dirty Statist Pigs ('A') beat the Party of Dirty Statist Pigs ('B') in Ontario's thirty-ninth general Election.

'Twas a landslide for Dirty Statists ('A'), although we the Decent Citizens of Ontario, victims of the landslide, find that when one is to be crushed in a shower of falling muck, one finds it largely immaterial which particular brand of filth it is under which one labours.

Hence the record low turn-out. Half did not exercise their vote.

And for a bunch of the rest of us, the whole business just kind of slipped our minds.

Early Returns

It's still only six thirty in Tranna so most of the Inukshuks aren't up yet. But this was funny from Andrew Coyne:

"Fascists 133; Crooks 88; Commies 34; Traitors 51; Tree-huggers 0; Loners 2."

If only Elections Canada did it like that, I bet there would be a better turnout. Probably not though. People are calling it an "election about nothing". I would add only, that it is being held over a country that has long since ceased to be about anything too.

Thanks Pierre.

Coming up next:

on the CBC's New autumn lineup.

CBC – Welfare Wampum: Indians, head feathers, drums and white Liberal guilt.

David Suzuki - Earth God: why you deserve to die so the 3-toed Siberian tree frog can live.

Little Jihad on the Prairie : The zany antics of sleeper cell- redneck culture clash.

Ottawa Report: running the country and designing society is a job for the ivy-walled university clique. 1 hour a week we make you feel disempowered and insignificant.

Election Night in Canada: socialism is good for you so we have packaged 4 brands of it to chose from

Marketplace: The urgent need for more government regulation to protect consumers against an industrial capitalist economy is explored weekly

I've started a meme. Cool.

I wondered where they made those things...

Oh come on.

You're not telling me seriously that there really is a place called "Moose Factory, Ontario".

Well, if there is, and the sitemeter isn't just pulling my leg, welcome to our reader from there, and congratulations on having the funniest place-name of the week.