Canadian Cincinnatus

Toronto Mayor David Miller’s latest crackdown on law-abiding citizens

The police program with the Orwellian-sounding name, Project Safe City, was announced on Wednesday by David Miller’s sycophantic police chief Bill Blair (“Smithers, unleash the hounds”). Who does it target? Law abiding citizens. Who did you think it would target, armed gangsters? Come on, get serious.

No, the target is people whose firearm Possession and Acquisition License (PAL’s) or Possession Only License (POL’s) have expired but who still have guns registered to them. What kind of people fall into this category? Well, seniors for one. People with a few guns that they had from years ago and who dutifully registered them when it was required of them and who have now become old and forgetful. Or other people who want a gun or two but aren’t so enthusiastic about the shooting sports that they keep up with all the paperwork that the firearms bureaucracy heaps on them. The irony is that if these people had ignored the government and never registered their guns when the Liberal government first demanded they do so, they could breath easy today for there would be no way for the police to know that they are gun owners. That will teach you to obey the law!

A third category is people who are on top of their legal duty, who did realize that their PAL will expire shortly and who therefore did send in their PAL renewal before the expiry date, but who unfortunately haven’t received their new PAL in the mail yet because it sometimes takes 9 months or more for the government to process it. And while there is no legal onus on the CFC to do basic paperwork in a reasonable time, there is a legal onus on gun owners to maintain a valid PAL at all times. In other words, the Toronto police is targeting people simply because the federal government isn’t doing its job. If this situation does not offend you as a Canadian citizen, then you have given me all the information I need to assess your moral state.

This brings to mind an anecdote from Miller’s last campaign against people who obey the law – closing down gun clubs that resided on City of Toronto property. One such club was located at the Mid-Scarborough Community Center. Across the hall from the range was a basketball court that was often used by local ‘youth’s’. Over the years there had been a number of incidents involving ‘gunplay’ in the parking lot. The work of gun club members? No, participants of the basketball league or their hangers on. Yet nobody raised a peep about the obvious gang presence at these games. As far as I know, they’re still there, occasional gunplay and all. And the gun club that generated no criminal activity whatsoever? Vilified for the crimes they never committed and shut down. And you wonder why Miller can’t get a grip on the city’s crime.

Does David Miller have any idea that his programs are targeting people who don’t fit a criminal profile, even remotely? While I think Miller’s understanding of public policy is low, I don’t believe even he is this dumb. A cynic might assume he is deliberately criminalizing his political opponents. And while I think it is safe to say that gun owners feel no love for his blondeness, I nevertheless think it is more basic than that. I think it is the result of a gut-level distaste experienced by elite gentry liberals like him when they encounter people who don’t share their political and aesthetic tastes: people who drive SUV’s rather than vintage bicycles; people who prefer a suburban house over a downtown ‘loft’; and people who’d rather have a box of Timbits than a glass of Perrier at a Yorkville bistro. While urban elites like to view themselves as tolerant and open-minded, their tolerance for diversity ends when they find somebody who doesn’t think like them or like the things they like. For Miller, Project Safe City is not about crime. He knows it can’t do anything about that.

Project Safe City – as well as Miller’s war on the automobile and urban sprawl - is about the people he is prejudiced against.

Michael Medved: “A Winning Formula for the GOP”

In the US, and to a lesser extent in Canada, there has been a debate about how the right can widen its electoral appeal. One the one side there are those (like me) “who demands uncompromising, confrontational, us-vs.-them rhetoric”, and on the other, there are the moderates who want a policy shift to the center.

 Conservative commentator Michael Medved, in a very illuminating and thought-provoking article in the USA Today, argues that this choice is a false dichotomy - that the real formula for success is a subtle blend of both strategies. The problem with the first strategy is that even in the reddest of red states, ideological conservatives do not form a majority. To win, you must persuade at least some ‘moderates’ to vote for you, but if you try to do this by watering down your policy platform, you end up alienating your base – people whose support you cannot afford to lose. Just ask John McCain.

The key to squaring this circle is a distinction that Medved perceptively observes:

“The point to remember about those citizens in the political middle who decide every national election is that they're the least philosophically committed, issues-oriented voters in the electorate. Interviews and conversation make it obvious that many citizens describe themselves as "moderate" because they feel uncertain of their place on the political spectrum, less engaged with the roiling controversies of the day. Moderates famously respond to personalities or atmospherics ("hope and change" or "compassionate conservatism") more than they react to nine-point plans or detailed position papers.”

I think his point is exactly right and worth remembering, for it holds the key to an ideological conservative victory.

“Republicans don't need less conservatism, and won't benefit from a more confrontational style. They actually need more conservatism, and a less confrontational style.

 

They must renew the same combination that worked for Republican winners for some 30 years. Ronald Reagan never abandoned conservative positions, but his genial approach to political combat won him the moderate voters he needed for two landslide victories.”

This is something I had been vaguely thinking about for some time but hadn’t been able to clearly grasp yet. However Medved hit the nail right on the head: ‘moderates’ are not moderate because they have a centrist ideology, they are moderate because they have no ideology at all. They are barbecue-and-ballgame people who don’t like politics. They respond to personality and tone much more than issues. This is hard for party activists and policy wonks (such as myself and presumably my readers) to keep in mind, both on the right and the left. We assume our neighbour is turned on (or off) by policy statements simply because so are we. But the truth of the matter is that they don’t care about this stuff at all.

As Medved points out, Reagan won because he was an ideological conservative (his base was rock solid) who didn’t come across as a hectoring scold. On the other side of the spectrum, Obama employed the same strategy. All that warm-fuzzy “hope and change” softened the edges of somebody who is essentially a hard-left ideologue. As a counter-example, John McCain got it exactly wrong. Consider his use of the word “bipartisan.” He must have pushed away 10,000 conservatives activists (you know, the people who might have volunteered and donated money to his campaign) each time he said it. Yet how many moderates did saying that word all the time deliver to him? My guess is zero. To them, the word bipartisan is some kind of inscrutable, inside-the-beltway jargon. Booooring.

Incidentally, this is why, last fall, Stephen Harper only squeaked out another minority against the weakest Liberal leader in Canadian history. He presented no policies (because he was afraid of alienating people), but he had to say something so he ended up running a largely negative campaign. Less conservatism, more negativism – exactly the wrong approach. And a historical opportunity to finish the Liberal Party off for good, wasted.

No. Medved is right: court your base first with facts and policies, then go after the fickle moderates later with psychology.

So the National Capital Commission doesn’t want to offend communists, eh?

A group called Tribute to Liberty (that has the support of most ethnic communities who have fled to Canada to get away from the ravages of communism) seeks to set up a memorial in Ottawa to commemorate the 100 million people who have been purposely killed by communist governments around the world. The various Holocaust museums in world capitals are clearly their model. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper “strongly supports” such this monument, apparently a majority of the members of the National Capital Commission (NCC), which oversees such things, is a little less enthusiastic.

According to the National Post, this is what the NCC members felt:

At a public meeting last week in Ottawa, members of the NCC's board approved the plans for a monument "in principle," allowing that the submitted application for the memorial "largely meets" the commission's criteria for a public exhibit on capital land. But several members expressed concern the name was too provocative, and should be revised to eliminate any mention of communism.

"I was unsettled by this name, and other members of the committee agreed with me," Hélène Grand-Maître, one commission member, said at the public approval hearing. "We should make sure that we are politically correct in this designation.... I feel this name should be changed."

Board member Adel Ayad noted that people who identify as communists might "not like" the memorial. "It's not communism itself that we should be fighting here. It is rather totalitarianism we are against in any form."

One commissioner questioned whether Canadians could even legitimately point fingers at the brutality of Stalin or Pol Pot, given that our own federal government had put Japanese-Canadians in internment camps during the Second World War.

Perhaps, suggested another, the best route would be to be avoid specifics, strike "communism" from the proposed name altogether, and dedicate the memorial to "victims of oppressive regimes," so as not to single any particular ideologies out.

What kind of idiot reasoning is this? The point of this monument is not to bring shame to totalitarianism in “any form”, but to shine the light of day on one specific, prevalent and malevolent form – communism. And if “people who identify as communists might "not like" the memorial”, well isn’t that the whole point of the thing?

The reason we constantly remind ourselves of the Holocaust is not to constantly dredge up the past and be a downer at trendy cocktail parties, but to make damn sure that things like this don’t ever happen again.

And how do we do that?

In a society where the freedom of thought is one of the deepest founding principles, we can’t do it by locking people up simply because they have expressed sympathies for National Socialism or communism. In a free society, we are constrained to use reason and argument. One such way is to employ shame. One reason we don’t have any out-of-the-closet National Socialists in our universities, media outlets and governments is because if any are there, they are too ashamed of themselves to publicly acknowledge what they really think. Everybody knows about the Holocaust and how millions of people were murdered in death factories like Auschwitz. Who wants to be associated with that?

The problem with communism is that shockingly few people understand the scope and breadth of communist atrocities. I do, but only because I am Estonian and my homeland was under Soviet occupation for 47 years. But many Canadians do not, and that’s the problem. That’s why a comment like the one above equating Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Canada’s treatment of Japanese Canadians can be uttered with nary an eyebrow raised. Aside from being a gross insult of Canada, most Canadians simply do not understand the scope of the comparison. Pol Pot deliberately killed up to one third of his own people in a couple of years. Try and visualize what that must have been like! If most of the people in that room had been able to, they would have looked at Adel Ayad and yelled, WTF?!?

But they don’t, because they don’t know, not really. And that’s the problem. While we mercifully lack National Socialists in our intelligentsia, we do have plenty of out-and-out communists, marxists, trotskyists and useful idiots in Che T-shits. To see why this is a problem consider the fact that before the Cambodian Killing Fields became known, Pol Pot was somewhat of a radical chic figure in academia, so much so that I have read reports indicating that early on in Pol Pot’s career, he had been advised by academics and grad students from MIT.

And these people aren’t ashamed of themselves! Well, not yet anyway. If some communist sympathizers amongst our elite end up feeling uncomfortable with the presence of this monument, then that is not an unfortunately byproduct, but the intended result.

Barack Obama = Neville Chamberlain

Having roots in a country that was once a part of the Soviet Union (Estonia), my biggest fear with the election of Barack Obama was that he would appease the wolves in Moscow. While the official US reason for installing the missile defence in Poland and The Czech Republic was to defend Europe against nuclear attack from rogue Iran, Iran is pretty far down the list of perceived dangers for anybody in Eastern Europe. Even though George W Bush may have believed that those missiles are there for that purpose, for Eastern Europeans, the missile shield was a powerful symbol of western support in their ongoing quest to remain free of the Russian bear. Therefore, when Obama contemplates bargaining away this symbol of legitimacy for half of Europe with the Kremlin, I see my worst fears coming true.

It is an inexorable result that when a country adopts a foreign policy based on weakness (both perceived and desired), that country will end up dumping on its allies while simultaneously currying favour with its implacable enemies. This is what Neville Chamberlain achieved in the 1930’s when he tried to placate National Socialist Germany by agreeing to the dismantling of the innocent country of Czechoslovakia. Because Chamberlain’s idealism (“peace at any price”) was based on cowardice and naiveté, the results he got were the polar opposite of what he wanted: the strong and evil got stronger and the weak and innocent got weaker.

A perfect example of this dynamic today is the Obama administration’s indifference to the Iranian freedom fighters, who are putting everything on the line to get rid of their mullahs, while he obsequiously curries favour with apocalyptic looney tunes like Ahmadinejad.

We should, however, not get too pessimistic. What will keep Eastern Europe free for the next 3 ½ years will not be the naïve idealists in the White House but the fact that things aren’t going well for the Kremlin either. Thanks to declining oil price, the expansion in the Red Army’s budget isn’t going ahead. What’s even better, the plan to professionalize the Russian Army (a necessary step if the Russian Army is to become effective again) is meeting with fierce resistance within the army because such plans would require the elimination of half the officer corps.

While the invasion of South Ossetia in Georgia last year was an outward success, a close look at what actually happened reveals how incompetent and weak the Russian Army actually is. The bulk of the Russian Army consists of conscripts and reserves. The units made up of these men could not be trusted to execute the complex manoeuvres required to invade another country. For that only the Russian Army’s professional units could be trusted, and they needed every single one of those units to take a postage stamp-sized land mass inhabited by only 45,000 souls. And to top it all off, the logistics of the plan got so screwed up that some Russian soldiers were left in the field without rations for 5 days. Looking at it from this perspective, the Russian Army is less imposing than it first seems.

A positive step that the Eastern European countries could take is to start organizing military exercises themselves - within the framework of NATO - but consisting of only Eastern European forces. Plans have to be drawn up by the former Soviet and Warsaw pact nations to defend themselves unilaterally from the Russian bear. While such a polyglot force would not have the power of, say, the US Army, it should be enough to stop a large but blundering mass of Putinist incompetents.

Most of all, the people of Eastern Europe need to understand that when it comes to the defence of free people around the world, the Obama administration’s slogan is, no we can’t. 

The greatest man of the twentieth century has died

Around 11 PM on Saturday night, Norman Borlaug died at the age of 95 at his home in Dallas.

Norman who? The greatest man of the twentieth century? What? I’ve never heard of him. What are you talking about?

 

If this is the first time you have ever heard Norman Borlaug’s name, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t know who he is. And that’s not right.

Norman Borlaug was an agronomist who taught at Texas A & M University from 1984 until his death. However, it was his research on wheat production in Mexico prior to that where he earned his greatness. By improving strains of wheat and making them more resistant to disease, Borlaug became the father of the Green Revolution - the transformation of agriculture, principally in the third world, that ended starvation over much of the planet. In 1968 the celebrated biologist and doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich predicted, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. … I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971," and "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Thanks to agricultural advances Borlaug devised, Ehrlich was proven wrong and India is today a net exporter of food, even though it has more people than ever. In gratitude, the Government of India awarded him (that is Borlaug, not Ehrlich) the Padma Vibhushan, its second highest civilian honour. The Times of London stated that his advances have saved the lives of 245 million people, however other estimates range as high as one or two billion people. Personally, considering the effect his innovations have had on world food production, I am inclined towards the higher estimates. In other words, a direct result of the deliberate actions he took, a billion or more souls are alive today whose fate otherwise would have been slow starvation.

To put it yet a third way, Norman Borlaug probably saved more human lives than anybody else in man’s history.

For this glorious feat he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, and unlike some of the cutthroats who have also won that prize (cf Yassir Arafat and Le Duc Tho), he actually deserved it.

One reason I am writing an obituary of him on this blog - something I am not usually in the habit of doing - is that it has long bothered me how unjustly our culture remembers its dead. The truly great depart from our midst with barely a mention while maudlin orgies of grief are orchestrated for people who are, at best, inconsequential shallow celebrities - or worse. A life-serving senator who deliberately allowed a friend to suffocate to her death because he felt that calling the police in time to save her life could be inconvenient for his career is given a near state funeral and is proclaimed the “lion of the senate”. A few weeks earlier, the world came to a screeching halt when a twisted pedophile died of a drug overdose simply because he made some OK music 20 years ago. These people don’t deserve to be remembered (and in a hundred years won’t be). In a century where the greatest statesmen were rated by how many tens of millions of their own people they deliberately murdered, we find Norman Borlaug, a selfless, humble but capable man patiently toiling away and doing so much good in the process that he was able to counteract all the evil that all those tyrants did put together.

In fairness, at the height of his powers, in the late sixties and early seventies, he was much better known that he is today, but by the eighties his celebrity star began to fall because the rising environmental movement became increasingly uncomfortable with many of the techniques he had pioneered – genetically engineered crops and high yield farming at the expense of subsistence farming, something the environmentalists have a romantic fixation about. All his stuff just isn’t ‘organic’. Of course, the fact that it can be held against somebody that he saved a billion lives only illustrates that some of the core foundations of the philosophy of environmentalism are evil.

Because of trendy environmentalism, entomologist Paul Ehrlich – the man whose gloomy predictions Borlaug foiled - is an academic celebrity name and a household word, while Borlaug is a comparatively anonymous. However this speaks poorly of us, not Norman Borlaug. His great work lives on, in the form of the countless people who are alive and breathing today because, for 95 years, so was he.

Norman Borlaug, rest in peace.

 

Stephen, don’t forget the political party subsidy issue!

A potentially winning issue for the Conservatives that should not be forgotten is the proposal to eliminate federal subsidies to political parties. I know there may be a tendency to forget the idea that triggered a near death experience for Harper’s minority government last winter (though, as I argued at the time, here and here, it was a near majority experience as well, if it has been played smarter). However, the correlation between the proposed subsidy elimination and the Three Stooges coalition should not obscure the fact that the policy – in and of itself – was very popular.

The elimination of government subsidies for political parties is in many ways the ideal issue for Conservatives because it is a rare confluence of populism, conservative principle and Machiavellian gain. Because it is populist, the undecideds in the mushy middle will like it. Because it reflects conservative principle (that the government has no business subsidizing political activism), the party’s core supporters will be energized. Because the separatist Bloc is the party most dependent on federal government subsidies, English Canada will rally behind it. And, above all, because it directly threatens the fiscal solvency of every federal political party except the Conservatives, it forces the Liberals and the NDP to take a determined stand against a popular issue in the middle of an election campaign.

Please Mr. Harper, I beg you, don’t let this glorious opportunity pass us by!

 

How Toronto is Wading into a Fiscal Crisis

The city of Toronto's staffing is out of control.

In 2001 I spent the month of August with my one-year-old son, taking him to the wading pool at the park every afternoon to cool off with a splash.  One surly teenage lifeguard, a City of Toronto parks employee, managed the little pool, usually spending the day sitting on a picnic table not too far away.

In 2004 I decided to take time with my kids again, so we headed to the park (I now had two sons) for some fun.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered there were now two lifeguards for the same little pool.  This is truly just a wading pool.  A one-year-old can stand up and the water will not get halfway up the kid's chest.  Still, children can drown in a bathtub, which is why parents are required to supervise their children in this tiny pool.  The lifeguards aren't watching the kids because that's the parent's job, by law, and it says so on the placard right by the pool.

Last week I headed to the wading pool with my kids.  You guessed it: three, count them, three life guards.  They tan together, flirt with one another (there were two teenage girls and one teenage boy last Wednesday) and hang out.  One of the lifeguards adds chlorine every few hours but otherwise they ignore us all.

So here's the dilemma: as the city runs out of money next year, someone will probably suggest cutting back from three lifeguards to two at each pool, and immediately the picketers will be at city hall decrying the cutback as a threat to the safety of our children.  The MSM will ignore the fact that these wading pools operated for 40 years with one lifeguard each without mishap.

Since a fiscally responsible mayor (assuming one is ever elected) will not be able to cut from three lifeguards back to one, the only option will be to close these pools that dot downtown parks, leaving them as little derelict concrete pads, monuments to a greedy city union.

Unfortunately, this is just a symptom of Toronto's disease.  Mayor David Miller has hired massively since he took office, including 1000 new hires this year alone, in the middle of the recession.  How many of these are as superfluous as three lifeguards doing a job that was filled more than adequately by one for over forty years--until Miller became mayor?

In April of 2010 the city must produce a budget that no longer has a $40 million dollar welfare reserve fund to draw on.  It is also far less likely to get a $400 million dollar gift from the province, and Toronto is spending well over $600 million dollars on new street cars.  Let's not even get into the price for new traffic congestion causing right-of-ways.  Since Miller won't cut staff and won't close downtown wading pools there is only one way for taxes to go: way up.

Even after Miller is gone, the city will have the millstone of a large bureaucracy around our collective necks.  Increasing the size of government is easy.  Reducing it is the labor of Sisyphus.

Mike Downtown

How Harper might win, and how he might lose

What Prime Minister Stephen Harper absolutely should not do is to run another Seinfeld campaign like he did last fall, where the hapless Stephane Dion and his Rube Goldberg-like carbon tax scheme made such an easy target. While this strategy worked (barely) against the weakest Liberal leader since Confederation, it is a mistake to try and replicate its success (such as it was), even if Michael Ignatief shares many of Dion’s weaknesses.

While negative attack ads do indeed work, successful campaigns require a judicious mix of the positive and the negative. Going 100% negative in the long run repels voters, as the declining voter turnout in recent years demonstrates (Canada now has a lower voter turnout than the US). What allowed Stephen Harper to get away with it until now is that the momentum of the Reform Party’s long term obsession with principle (i.e. the positive message) was so strong that can be felt to this day. That is the real secret behind the Conservative Party’s small donor campaign base. But eschewing principle for partisan manoeuvring, as Harper has done in the past several years, he has frittered away a lot of that goodwill. This goodwill needs to be recharged – badly - for many conservatives are now saying to themselves, what the hell to I care whether Tweedledeeharper or Tweedledumignatief gets driven around by the prime ministerial limousine? You want my vote (and more crucially, my time and money), show me the beef.

What Stephen Harper should do instead is to revisit his 2006 campaign playbook, the one that stopped the Paul Martin juggernaught in its tracks with its emphasis on a series of policy platforms. Because the Liberals were waiting for an all-sponsorship scandal-all-the-time attack orgy, they were caught completely flat-footed by the switch. As a result, they were the ones to ran a Seinfeld campaign, without refuting any of their reputation for corruption. Today, a similar opportunity has opened up, thanks to Obama’s unintentional depopularization of socialism down south. These days, stimulus is a four letter word. Now would be a perfect time for Harper to put forward a conservative economic message as the best way out of the recession.

This approach would do several things:

1. For the first time in a long time, it would give conservative stalwarts a positive reason to support their party. You can’t win an election when your core supporters are apathetic.

2. It would demonstrate, with concrete examples, to the apathetic middle-of-the-road why the Conservatives are better managers of the economy than the Liberals.

3.  It would force the Ignatief to explain his own position as a way of differentiating himself from Harper, or failing to do that (the more likely scenario), to show himself to be a dithering Hamlet. (Remember Paul Martin, a.k.a. Mr. Dithers?)

This is why I was so heartened by this story in the Globe and Mail, which suggests that the Harper Tories are slowly awaking from their dogmatic slumbers.

Oh yeah, and when you have finished selling your positive message, there is no reason in the world you can’t saturate the airwaves in the last week of the campaign with attack ads accusing Ignatief of being an effete American academic and a decadent minor member of foreign nobility – somebody with about as much of the common touch as John Francois Kerry.

 

CBC Struggles to Save Liberal Golden Boy

By now most of Ontario has heard that former Attorney-General Michael Bryant sped down the wrong lane of Bloor Street in Toronto with a bike courier, Darcy Allan Sheppard, clinging to his car, trying to scrap the man off on trees and mail boxes until Mr. Sheppard finally fell under the tires of Bryant's car.

But last night I was surprised when CBC's edition of The National kicked off with a character attack on the dead bike courier, firing the first salvo in Michael Bryant's defense.  They lined up experts and even police who talked about how drunk Sheppard was before the incident and how Bryant may have been defending himself from an assault.

This could certainly be true.  Anyone who has driven in downtown Toronto knows that many bicycle couriers ride as if they are exempt from the highway traffic act but have been deputized to aggressively enforce it against cars.  We'll have to wait for the trial to really get to the bottom of this tragedy.

But here's what got me about the piece on The National: if former Conservative Premier Mike Harris, or  right-wing Toronto councillor Rob Ford, had been in Bryant's place, I can't picture The National starting off by highlighting the courier's drunken history.

Instead, I'm betting they'd have begun with the protest march of one thousand cyclists that snarled downtown traffic during yesterday afternoon's rush hour, which resulted in network news helicopters buzzing for hours over my neighborhood.  After that the CBC may have mentioned quickly that the courier was allegedly aggressive and drunk, but I don't believe it would have been in the first line of text.

Of course, I can't say with certainty that the CBC would've covered this any differently if it were a right wing politician in handcuffs.  I'm just suspicions since the CBC usually trumpets the advantages of two wheels over four, and usually takes the side of the working class over the $100,000+ a year class.  To hear them start off by digging through a bike courier's sordid past while excusing the Harvard-educated, convertible-Saab-driving lawyer struck me as out of character.  If he'd been a bank executive, I venture to say they would've reluctantly reported mitigating details only after they were read into evidence at the trial in a few months.

For a long time now I've believed that the cappuccino-sipping, university-educated liberal establishment has been losing touch with the common people, whose well-being they constantly trumpet they are defending.  More and more, I hear liberal politicals and even the NDP speak of the common man with contempt, as a buffoon who doesn't have their deep understanding of global climate change or congestion traffic planning, and must be socially engineered and controlled.  Didn't Michael Bryant pass laws against cell phones in cars?

Michael Ignatief, Jack Layton and Toronto Mayor David Miller also definitely have this disease.  Indeed, I wonder if Mr. Bryant shouted at this bike courier with the contempt of a 17th century Russian aristocrat addressing a surf?  If so it was unfortunate timing, because Mr. Sheppard had just had a very bad day.

Listening to CBC zealously defend one of their liberal golden boys, the youngest man ever to fill the role of Attorney-General of Ontario--once presumed to go on to be premier one day--indicates to me that the liberal-left don't realize what an elite they have become, and how far they've wandered from the lives of people who don't have gold-plated government pensions--like bike couriers.

The CBC might not alienate their viewing public by blaming Mr. Sheppard, since most people drive cars regardless of what the Toronto Transit Commission says, but they will fail to make a hero out of a rich liberal who, with a 3000 pound car, runs over an impoverished drunk on a 25 pound bike, no matter how justified.

They can't save Michael Bryant's career, and they should stop trying.

Mike Downtown

Al Jazeera: “clearly better, more honest, more informative and more entertaining than CNN International or the BBC”

Roger Simon, who is Jewish and definitely pro-Israel, finds, to his surprise, that the English language version of Al Jazeera is more fair and balanced than CNN or the BBC.