Canadian Cincinnatus

The anarchist violence in the UK

Nick Cohen of the Spectator gets it:

As for the anarchists, let us be honest and acknowledge political violence is not always futile. If there isn’t violence, the media will give only perfunctory coverage to a demonstration, something that ought to worry my colleagues more than it does. Today’s proponents of breaking the law and scaring shop girls can also say that riots and a mass refusal to pay destroyed the poll tax in Mrs. Thatcher's day. I am sure readers can throw the moral argument against political violence in a democracy in their faces, but for me the decisive point is that by the time of the protests against the poll tax exploded, virtually everyone in Britain except Mrs. Thatcher had accepted the case against it.

I have long noted that many political strategists suffer from the desire to prefer politically correct shibboleths over cold, unpleasant truths. For instance, many believe that political violence doesn’t work. While it true that middle class voters are repelled by the sight of professional left-wing vandals ritualistically fighting in the street, history nevertheless teaches us that political violence is also an effective way of getting what you want. Many people can be scared into ‘going along to get along’ with an idea that they may be repulsed by. Cowards and thugs – not a pretty picture of society, but one paid political realists should acknowledge more than they actually do.

None of the foregoing analysis is made to justify political violence. When the left equates rioting with political speech, they have it exactly backwards: rioting is the negation of political speech; it is the negation of democracy; it is the negation of a civil society. My purpose in this article is only to point out the frightening fact that political violence does work, and more often than we acknowledge. Which is all the more reason to ruthlessly crush it when it happens.

Don’t forget about the campaign funding issue, Stephen

With all the hubbub swirling about secret coalition agendas in this election campaign, the Conservatives should endeavour not forget the campaign finance issue: you know, the plan to cut public subsidies to political parties, announced in the Nov 27, 2008 fiscal update that precipitated the three-stooges-coalition crisis. Eliminating public payments to political parties is very popular with the voters and it will knee-cap the Liberals who – thanks to campaign finance restrictions - can no longer access their traditional source of funds: fat-cat donors.

The only thing is: as popular as abolishing political subsidies is, it can’t be done without explicitly promising it first in the campaign. As Mike Downtown noted in the last post:

I once read a book in which a king states that he can break laws while ruling his kingdom, but he can't go against what the people have always assumed is the law, the tradition. In this case voters expect the party with the most votes gets to form the government.

Another tradition that the voters are fond of is the tradition that the government doesn’t enact any laws that it didn’t campaign for (unless they are a reaction to some unforeseen event). Though promises are broken all the time, the public hates this and will hate it doubly so if the law is seen to be self-serving.

If the Conservatives win a majority and then cut funding to political parties without mentioning that they plan on doing this in the campaign, the public will see this as an undemocratic move designed to create a one-party state. And they will loathe the Conservatives for it. 

To avoid that fate, say it loud and say it proud now. The Liberals will squeal but the public will be against them and, as a result, the Libs will lose even more votes. And when the new Conservative majority gets around to enacting it, the public will accept it as a legitimate policy change.

 

Does Ignatieff Just Want To Go Home? (To Harvard)

The polls say he's 20 points behind the conservatives, so short of a drastic reversal of fortune there is no chance that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff can win enough votes to form even a minority government, yet he desperately wants an election.

Many have already speculated that if the conservatives win a similar minority, Iggy plans to revive Stephan Dion's unholy alliance with the separatists and the socialists to form a government.  He has kind of, but not really, denied this in such a way that he can easily deny that he denied it.  Yes, confusing, and this will haunt him for the rest of the election.

But I wonder if he wants an election for a much simplier reason: maybe he's fed up with being in politics.  It's much easier being a pundit about politics than actually being a politician.  In fact, I'm reminded of the HBO series Rome when Ceaser has left Mark Anthony in charge of Rome for a time.  Anthony, clearly missing combat and bored silly, complains, "Running Rome is not as amusing as I thought it would be."

But now that Iggy is leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, how does he quit and go back home to Harvard without looking like...well...a quitter?  Simple: force the election that some of his party members want, go down spectaularly in flames, and he'll get tossed by his own party after the election.  He can go back to Harvard with his head held high, write a book about it all and go on talk shows, where he'll probably talk about what "we Americans have to decide" about the issue du jour.

But if his plan is the unholy alliance, he's going to find himself in huge trouble.  It may not be illegal to form the government even though the Conservatives have the biggest share of seats, but Iggy would be breaking an unwritten rule.  I once read a book in which a king states that he can break laws while ruling his kingdom, but he can't go against what the people have always assumed is the law, the tradition. In this case voters expect the party with the most votes gets to form the government.

If Ignatieff goes against that he may form his coalition government and hold power for a while, but he'll have to shovel endless money at Quebec and NDP socialist programs in order to stay afloat.  This will be incredibly unpopular.  Eventually even Iggy will have to admit that the country is out of money and the Bloc will bring down his government just to prove they have the power.  When he has to face the voters again I believe the liberals will go down to their greatest defeat in Canadian history.  It may even rival the shellacking the old PC party received under Kim Campbell.

But untold damage would be done to the Canadian economy in the meantime, and our deficit will rival Obama's GDP ratio debt.

Perhaps its wishful thinking on my part, but I hope Iggy just wants to go home to Harvard.

Mike Downtown

How Conservative activists completely misread moderate Canadians

According to conventional wisdom, there are three groups of people on the political spectrum: the left, the center and the right – each with its own set of core values. If somebody on the left or right edge wants to win an election, he has to appeal to the ‘moderates’ in the middle, and the way he does that is by watering down his more ‘extreme’ policy items until the moderates feel comfortable with him. This theory explains that the reason moderates don’t vote for the fringes parties is because they are repelled by their ‘extreme views’.

This analysis is completely wrong, and here’s why:

Political junkies on the right and, to a lesser extent on the left, completely misread the character of the voters who inhabit the ‘center’ of the political spectrum. The reason they do so is because these people approach politics completely differently from the political junkie. Let’s compare the differences: The activist has a strong interest in politics, with a abiding desire to see deeply held principles applied; the centrist is bored by politics and wants to think about it as little as possible. The activist is guided by a more-or-less coherent set of principles; the centrist doesn’t care as long as things run smoothly. If things are falling apart, he reaches for the most plausible solution offered at the time. In short, the centrist is a normal person. It is us political junkies who are weird.

This means that you can’t appeal to moderates by watering down policies. This tactic fails because most moderates are simply unaware that policy platforms exist in the first place, and to the extent that they are aware, they are bored. This is why conservative politicians almost always spiral downwards when they start jettisoning their core values: they enrage their base while the people they seek to woo merely shrug their shoulders.

So what does appeal to moderates, if it isn’t policy?

Personality and leadership, that’s what. Human beings are hard-wired from hunter-gatherer days to be attracted to a winner; to somebody who exhibits leadership ability; to an alpha presence. How do you communicate that in a campaign? Not by saying you are a leader. Anybody can do that. You can do it partly by resume. This is why victorious generals, successful CEO’s and past political leaders with winning records make good candidates. The trouble however with relying only on the past is that people are more concerned with the future. What reaches the moderate more effectively is the leader’s behaviour on the campaign trail. Does he handle himself like a leader or not? John Tory was doomed in the last Ontario election not because of the faith-based funding issue – that was merely the catalyst – but by how he handled it. The more they saw him dig the hole deeper for himself, the less leaderlike he appeared and the more he was despised. And despise is the right word. The cruel fact is that the flip side of our natural attraction to leaders is our contempt for non-leaders. The moment Tory jettisoned the faith-based funding issue (an issue he had proclaimed to be a fundamental guiding principle for him) was the moment his fate was sealed. Anybody who abandons a cherished principle for expediency is weak. Don’t vote for him! A good counter-example from the left can be found in David Miller’s first mayoral campaign in Toronto. In that election, Miller campaigned resolutely against the building of a bridge to the island airport. While this issue concerned few Torontonians, they saw his resoluteness as evidence of leadership and rewarded him accordingly.

And to be fair, the disengaged person in the mushy middle is more right on this point than the principled policy wonk. Exhibited leadership skills are usually a better indicator of future performance than a perfect policy platform (that will only be torn up at the first speed bump). This is why Mitt Romney has a hard time selling himself to Republicans in spite of his impeccable policy positions. He has flip-flopped so much that conservatives fear he is a craven panderer.

Another way to win over a moderate voter is to take a problem of the day, clearly explain the solution in terms he understands, champion that solution through thick and thin and don’t worry about whether the chattering classes christen it moderate or not. The moderate voter doesn’t care whether a solution is moderate or not. His approval is affected more by whether it makes sense to him. But if it does make sense to him and he sees you fighting for it, he will respond favourably to you. This is what Ronald Reagan did; this is why he was called the Great Communicator and this is why his popularity increased precisely at the moments when he championed solutions that were on the fringes of political discussion at the time.

Want more evidence?

As I keep pointing out, look at Toronto – heartland of big-L liberalism. Fearless, hard right Mike Harris and Rob Ford thrive here. Nice, safe Ernie Eves and John Tory failed miserably. This dynamic also works (albeit to a lesser extent) on the left. This is why left-wing Jean Chrétien was successful, but fiscally conservative and socially liberal (all together now - “just the way Canadians like their politicians!”) John Turner and Paul Martin failed.

The only time a policy pronouncement sounds extreme to the moderate voter is when he hasn’t been convinced that it solves the problem de jure. Or worse, when it solves a problem he doesn’t acknowledge in the first place. Exhibit A: Obamacare.

So the moral of the story is this: convince the voter that the conservative policy you champion solves a problem he acknowledges, and don’t worry if it is ‘centrist’ or not. The moderate voter will thank you for it.

 

How Stephen Harper can win a majority

If there is a federal election this spring in Canada, all indications point to more of the same: another Conservative minority government. The principal reason is because the Bloc has a lock on 40 seats in Quebec. As long as this remains the case, the only way any party can win a majority is if it wins a supermajority elsewhere in Canada. While Harper is seen to be a competent manager and the Liberals are seen to be led by a weak, vacillating leader, this advantage is partially cancelled out by the fact that the Conservatives are currently beset with a bunch of small-time scandal. While these individually don’t amount to much, collectively they serve as friction, throwing sand under the wheels of the Conservative’s locomotive of victory. Nevertheless, this is not Harper’s biggest obstacle. The biggest impediment to a Conservative supermajority in the rest of Canada is that the voters there need a compelling reason to vote Conservative and, at present, none exists.

While there is no bigger fan on American-style attack ads than me, there is limit to what negative campaigning can accomplish. The trouble with continuing to paint Ignatieff as an ineffectual opportunist is that the voters already know that. While the Liberals can’t shake the charge, the Conservatives have already gotten all the benefit that they are going to get from this issue.

So if he wants a majority, Harper needs something more.

Here is my suggestion: switch gears completely in the next federal election; stop playing it small; use the campaign to announce a clear conservative vision for Canada; force the Liberals to have a substantive debate on where Canada is going; and challenge the Liberals to come up with a competing vision of their own. The trick to pulling this off is to find two or three conservative issues that a significant minority of Canadians already agree with and fight for those things tooth and nail. His base will rally towards him like never before and enough mushy moderates in the middle will flock to his newfound alpha-male presence to give him the majority that has eluded him until now.

This is what Mike Harris did with his Common Sense revolution; this is what Rob Ford did with his “respect the taxpayers” campaign that swept him into power in Toronto – the heartland of the Liberal Party; in fact, a watered-down version of this strategy was how Harper won his first minority in 2006.

Stephen Harper doesn’t have to worry any more about the increasingly hysterical Liberal charge of right-wing extremism. He has already won that debate (see previous post).

All elections are a judicious mix of negative and positive messages. For the moment, the Conservatives have maxed out on the negative. It is time to go positive – with a clear conservative vision!

The one thing Harper can’t afford is another Seinfeld campaign like 2008, when the only substantive issue on the table was just exactly how much of an idiot Stephane Dion really is.

 

Why Stephen Harper is beset with nickel-and-dime scandals

When Stephen Harper first became leader of the Conservative Party, he set out to solve one pressing problem: how to cancel out the Liberal assertion, repeated ad nauseum, that Conservatives are too extreme for Canada. The implication of their assertion is that because Canadians are moderates, the Liberal Party is therefore the de facto Party of Canada. Harper worried because he saw what had happened to the Democrat Party in the US after it had assumed the mantle of anti-Americanism, which gave the Republicans a monopoly on American patriotism. They saw how this had helped the Republicans out countless number of times while burning the Democrats as many times. Harper was afraid that 10 years of Chretienite propaganda was reducing the Conservative party to becoming the un-Canadian Party of Canada.

To combat this, the 2006 campaign slogan was chosen to be, “Standing Up for Canada”. It’s hard to tar somebody as anti-Canadian when all he talks about is standing up for Canada.

The next step Harper took was to prove by action that the Conservative Party isn’t extreme. This is why Harper has assiduously avoided rocking the boat in his first 5 years as PM. And this strategy has worked for its intended purpose. Liberal cries that the Conservatives are “too extreme!” are sounding increasingly hysterical as time goes on. 

Mission accomplished.

The weakness of his strategy is that it leaves the Conservatives open to attack on small change scandals like the Bev Oda “not” affair. Why? Because, just as nature abhors a vacuum, the body politic abhors a political vacuum. The Liberals and the NDP are the loyal opposition. Their job is to oppose, so that’s what they do. That means that they have to complain about something. And if the government does very little that is substantively controversial, they will carp about something else.

If Stephen Harper had played it big by adopting an ambitious conservative agenda, none of these scandals would have ever seen the light of day. Instead, Canadian political debate would have been dominated by big topics. The opposition wouldn’t care if Bev Oda had written the word “not” into an agreement or not. They would be expending all their energy trying to stop the forward march of conservatism.

If you don’t believe me, look at Mike Harris. His tenure was remarkably scandal-free. Why? Big issues, that’s why. You were either for his Common Sense Revolution or against it. There was no middle ground and little interest in anything else. Another example: the 1988 federal election when Brian Mulroney chose to make that election a referendum on free trade. As soon as he did that all of the myriad scandals that Mulroney had accumulated receded into obscurity. The result: he won the debate on conservative principles and he was re-elected.

When you play it small, peace and quiet is not the result. That is impossible in Parliament. The result is partisan bickering over the kind of petty scandals that inevitably arise when something as big as the federal government is being governed.

The real worry for the Harper government is that if these scandals are allowed to accumulate over time, there may be a point in time when Stephen Harper looks as corrupt as Jean Chrétien or Brian Mulroney. 

 

Another example of the left getting punked

Conservative activist James O'Keefe strikes again! He was the guy behind the ACORN/prostitution sting. Now he records National Public Radio executives going gaga over the Muslim Brotherhood.

What a change. Back in the 60's, when the left was hip and cool it was they who did the punking and, more often than not, it was the right who was the target. Look at the befuddled villagers in the Woodstock film or high-as-a-kite Hunter S Thompson crashing the National District Attorney’s Conference in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, making fools of clueless law enforcement officials. It was a simple time back then. What great fun they had!

But these days, it is usually the left that is the befuddled target - and conservative activists with flip cameras and cell phones who are doing the punking. Consider the ACORN scandals (already mentioned); (now) former Democrat Congressman Bob Etheridge’s on-camera physical assault on a 21 year old student who dared to ask him a question; New Black Panthers caught red-handed in Philadelphia engaging in voter intimidation; e-mails that surfaced from high-level mainstream media figures where they plot on how to best distort the news in favour of Democrats; and most recently, the citizen-produced videos that have been pouring out of Madison, Wisconsin showing striking public workers acting like goons and left-wing doctors writing fraudulent sick notes to illegal strikers. These are just a few of the more noteworthy events where prominent leftists are on the losing end of some conservative activists’ sting.

The left is losing its mojo. They know it and it’s driving them crazy.

Thomas Sowell: “Moderation is fine — if it is not carried to extremes.”

The great economist Thomas Sowell has some advice for squishy Republican moderates that, I believe, applies to their Red Tory cousins north of the border as well:

“Republican moderates warn their fellow Republicans that they need to move away from the Ronald Reagan approach, in order to attract a wider range of voters. But Ronald Reagan won two consecutive landslide elections — and he couldn’t have done that if the only people who voted for him were dedicated conservatives. 

What Reagan had was a clear, coherent, and believable message. Even voters who did not agree with him 100 percent could respect that and prefer it to the alternative.

He didn’t have to offer earmarked goodies to each special group, in order to get their votes. Pandering can gain you some votes but lose you many others.”

“Apparently some moderate Republicans don’t realize that you can’t buy your opponents’ assumptions and then try to oppose the conclusions that follow.”

I think squishy RINO’s get their enthusiasm for moderation from mainstream media commentators who are always encouraging Republicans to compromise - because if they don’t (gasp!) they will lose moderate voters to the Democrats, the commentators caution. The question moderate Republicans unceasingly fail to ask is, why should Republicans trust the advice of left-wing columnists? Considering the fact that they are out-of-the-closet Democrat supporters, isn’t their motivation suspect?

And if moderation really was the key to electoral success for Republicans, why was Ronald Reagan so successful? And why did ‘maverick’ John McCain get shellacked in 2008?

Perhaps they don’t give a damn about the Republicans; perhaps they are merely using the powers of suggestion to get the Republicans to hold back when they have the upper hand, so the conservative agenda – which they detest – doesn’t go forward. Hmmm?

To move the discussion north of the border, if moderation is where it’s at for conservatives, how come Mike Harris and Rob Ford were successful in the same electoral area (i.e. Toronto) where Ernie Eves and John Tory got crushed?

Earth to moderate conservatives: it’s best not to take advice from your political enemy.

How to compete globally without slashing wages and benefits

Walter Russell Mead has an excellent article on globalization and how to succeed at it without “a race to the bottom.” First he describes the problem:

“For many Americans, the changes in our society — stagnant or falling real wages for non-supervisory employees, cutbacks in public services, rising costs of medical care, an affordability crisis in higher education and on and on — look like the consequences of what is often called “the race to the bottom.”  Global competition is forcing us to cut costs in an effort to compete with low wage countries like China, Vietnam and Bangladesh.  Restless and amoral capital shifts endlessly around the world looking for the cheapest labor, lowest taxes and the fewest regulations when it comes to questions like environmental protection and worker safety.

More, regular readers of this site will know that I’ve been predicting yet another turn of the screw.  Blue collar workers have been getting the shaft since 1973; white collar workers are starting to get the same treatment now.  Two of the same forces that drove down blue collar wages are starting to hit professionals: competition from overseas and the use of technology to raise productivity so that fewer workers are needed to do the same amount of work. The US manufacturing sector has actually grown since 1973, producing more even as it has shed workers.  There is no reason why the same thing can’t happen to lawyers, middle managers, government bureaucrats and many more white collar workers as computers get smarter and firms start outsourcing professional work overseas.”

A familiar argument? But his antidote to the problem is not the usual one you would expect:

“I see those arguments and have felt their force for thirty years.  I’m not, however, convinced that they ultimately make sense.  I’ve been thinking about globalization and the future of American prosperity and power since writing Mortal Splendor and in those thirty years I haven’t so much changed my mind about the problems we face as come to a better understanding of the roots of American prosperity...

I wrote in my first post on Madison that I don’t think that restructuring state government is about the race to the bottom: it’s the way to avoid a race to the bottom.  That answer needs a bit more elaboration.  The world is in a race: a race to be the most efficient and innovative.  Cheapness is one way to win this race: cheap labor can be an advantage.

But America shouldn’t compete on the basis of cheap labor: we are not nor should we try to be the Walmart of Work.  So the first question becomes how do we compete in ways that don’t involve endlessly ratcheting down wages and benefits?  And the second, related question is how can we generate enough demand for American workers so that market forces drive incomes up from year to year and decade to decade?

The key to success is obvious: we need to continue to raise productivity throughout the economy.  If productivity goes up quickly enough, wages can rise here even if they are falling elsewhere.  This is getting harder; productivity is both easier to measure and to raise in manufacturing than in services.  But substituting capital and technology for human sweat has to be a large part of what we do.

To raise productivity significantly, and especially to do it in ways that give us some long term advantages, we are going to have to do more about productivity in services.”

Mead elaborates on the usual solution to this problem and why it doesn’t work: 

“Change like this always looks like a race to the bottom for the people directly involved: spinners and weavers in 1810 and Wisconsin state government workers today.  When disruptive change happens so fast that people are being thrown out of work faster than new sectors can absorb them, wages can decline throughout the economy.  Since 1973 in the US, millions of women were entering the workforce even as increasing productivity and overseas outsourcing were reducing the number of manufacturing jobs. Wages stagnated and fell — often driving more women into the workforce to make up for their husbands’ falling income.

The cure for this process is not to stop technology in its tracks.  That is what the Luddites tried to do in 19th century Britain: destroying the machines that were killing jobs and reducing wages.  The cure is to exploit the opportunities that new technology and (temporarily) low wages create for innovation.”

To me this argument is a breath of fresh air because the argument put forward by the left – and also from paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan – that globalization is bad because it puts Americans out of work always bothered me. It bothers me for two reasons: first, because I am instinctively pro-freedom; and second, because I am honest enough to see a kernel of truth in what they say - blue-collar jobs are being lost.  Its fine to tell people, go get a PhD in biophysics from MIT and invent something in biomechanics. But what if you can’t? What if you are not smart enough to do that? One strength of the old, manufacturing North America was that it guaranteed a decent job to almost every hard working, person. There was something in it for all honest citizens. A nation of credentialed Harvard haves and blue collar have-nots ‘clinging bitterly to their guns and religion’ does not make for a stable society, regardless how economically efficient it is. 

In this article, Mead points out the silver lining that pessimistic commentators often miss when they focus only on the negative effects of Schumpterian creative destruction. But read the whole article. It is long but worth it.

The right to self-defense is the citizen’s most important right

Many people, especially liberals make the claim that the right to free speech is our most important right. Others believe it is freedom of the press. Still others assert freedom of assembly, or the right to free elections. In contrast, I assert that as important and fundamental as those rights are, there is one right more fundamental still, and that is a right to self-defense.

This right, or rather, the absence of this right is illustrated by the Ian Thomson case. As I detailed in a post a couple of weeks ago, Ian Thomson is an unemployed person living in Port Colborne who woke up early last August 22 to what he thought were gunshots. They turned out to be not gunshots but explosions from Molotov cocktails that were thrown into his house by three armed thugs. While assaulting him with deadly force, they yelled death threats at him to get him to stay inside and burn to death. Most properly it can be said that Ian Thomson’s life was in deadly danger.

To respond, he grabbed a handgun that was legally registered to him and stored in accordance with the Firearm Act’s safe storage requirements and proceeded outside to face God knows what. He fired three warning shots at his would-be murders and they fled. For his troubles, the cops charged him with “unsafe use of a firearm,” “pointing a firearm” and “careless storage of a firearm”.  

Apparently the Crown Prosecutors thinks what Ian Thomson did was wrong. I ask, so what is Ian Thomson supposed to have done? Is it his duty as a Canadian citizen to throw himself at the mercy of firebombers? And if they decide to not be merciful is it his duty to let his murderers kill him? Or is he allowed to resist, but only after every option for defending himself is no longer possible? Hey, Mr. Prosecutor! Isn’t that too late?

From this case, and from the David Chen case last fall, it is clear that our prosecutors’ answers to the above question are: submit, yes, yes, yes and yes. As I said about the David Chen affair, “Public safety is not the main motivating factor in the police department’s disapproval. Rather, cops don’t like spontaneous citizen action because it infringes on their monopoly on force. They look at citizen arrests the way unionized city garbagemen view private contractors who haul away the trash for less money.” 

It can be seen that, from Ian Thomson’s point of view at 6 AM on August 22, his right to self-defense trumped his right to say what he wanted, operate a printing press, assemble in a crowd or elect a city councillor. We must understand that the difference between Ian Thomson and any one of us is circumstances, at least if the prosecutors – theoretically our servants – have their way. We are all Ian Thomson because if he loses his case, we will live in a country where it is everybody’s duty to be a victim. And if you are about to be a murder victim, who cares about anything else?

Columnist Lorne Gunther has related thoughts.

There is a rally to support Ian Thomson tomorrow put on by the Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA). The following is copied from the CSSA press release.

“CSSA members are encouraged to attend a rally of support for Ian Thomson on March 2nd at 9:00 a.m. in Welland, ON. Mr. Thomson (of Welland) was recently charged with numerous firearms offences when he defended himself again three masked men throwing Molotov cocktails at his home and dog house. While Mr. Thomson was not injured, one of his dogs suffered burns.  CSSA General Counsel and noted firearms lawyer Edward L. Burlew LL.B., is defending Thomson. If you feel Canadians must be allowed to protect their own safety and property without being forced to defend themselves against criminal charges, come and show your support. The rally will be held at the Welland Court House, 102 East Main Street, Welland, Ontario L3B 3W6 and all caring citizens are encouraged to participate.”

As I already mentioned in my last article on this subject, Mr. Thomson has now been reduced to poverty by this persecution. For this reason, Mr. Thomson’s lawyer, Ed Burlew is urgently soliciting donations for Mr. Thomson’s defense. Details of how you can help out can be found by calling Mr. Burlew’s office at 1-888-486-5677.