Canadian Cincinnatus

Free Speech defeat in the British Columbia Supreme Court

According to the National Post:

‘In a ruling that could carry implications for comedy clubs across Canada, the Supreme Court of British Columbia has upheld the right of a bar patron to receive five-figures in damages from a comedian whose performance she alleges gave her post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 2011, Toronto comedian Guy Earle was ordered by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal to pay $15,000 to Lorna Pardy, a homosexual woman who said she suffered “lasting physical and psychological effect” after Mr. Earle directed a string of lesbian slurs at her during a 2007 Vancouver open mic night. 

On Wednesday, B.C. highest court ruled against Mr. Earle’s assertion that comedy clubs should remain special places devoted to the “fearless pursuit of free speech” and that the Tribunal’s decision would have a “chilling effect on performances and artists in British Columbia.”’

The “chilling effect” is a feature not a bug.

‘Rather, ruled Justice Jon Sigurdson, while comedy clubs may swirl with “offensive, irreverent and inappropriate” language they are not operating in “zones of absolute immunity from human rights legislation.”’

Nothing - NOTHING - is immune “from human rights legislation.” What do you think? Ya live in a free country or something?

‘Nevertheless, in the judge’s words, “Mr. Earle was not giving a comedy performance when he launched into his tirade of ugly words directed at Ms. Pardy.” 

So, in 21^st century Canada, we need Supreme Court Justices to decide on what constitutes comedy and what constitutes a “tirade of ugly words”. I’m old enough to remember a time when comedy was defined by whether an audience laughed or not. Any word on how the other patrons in the comedy club reacted? Were they splitting their sides in mirth, or were they hysterically shrieking while clutching their hemlines? 

And while we’re at it, since when is a “tirade of ugly words” and “a comedy performance” mutually exclusive activities?

“In the end, this is not a case about the scope of expression in a comedy performance or an artistic performance,” he wrote. “It is about verbal and physical abuse that amounts to adverse treatment based on sex and sexual orientation.”’

OK, so how exactly does being berated by a comedian at an edge comedy club - that you entered voluntarily in order to attend the performance of an edgy comedian - constitute physical abuse?

And since when have we considered our adult citizens so fragile that their egos need to be protected by inquisitions and law courts?

Oh yes. For heterosexual, conservative white males such as myself, the answer is never. Sorry, my mistake.

But make no mistake about this: unless and until people start actively pushing back against the PC bullies, the boundaries of what we can and cannot say, will continue to become steadily constricted over time; and more of us get to experience the visceral, increasingly omnipresent dread associated with saying the wrong (career ending) thing that necessarily comes with the privilege of living in a ‘harassment-free’ society.

How Canadian Members of Parliament can regain their freedom

One of the things I like about the US government is that representatives and senators have so much more freedom than Canadian MP’s. Every congressman has his own foreign policy, domestic policy, tax policy and gun control policy. In contrast, all you need to know about a Canadian MP is his party affiliation. His party platform and the enthusiasms of his leader are his opinions. Period.

Dissatisfaction with the arrogant, phoney conservative Brian Mulroney led the old Reform Party to champion grass-roots democracy and freedom for Members of Parliament to vote according to their conscience. Judging by the dissatisfaction of many western backbenchers in Stephen Harper’s caucus, this ideal has not been forgotten.

Unfortunately, as much as I sympathise with their ultimate goal, the means proposed – more freedom for MP’s to speak out, introduce private members bills and vote freely – won’t work. These reforms are doomed to fail because our system of government is rigged against independent legislators. On Parliament Hill, a disciplined party with a bold, decisive leader is rewarded, and loosely organized grass-roots mobs are crushed. This is one of the historical reasons why, for so long, the Liberals were the National Governing Party and the Conservatives were the ne’er do well opposition. If grass-roots conservatives want to return to those unhappy days, when Gallic autocrats were free to impose their top-down vision on Canada, just keep pressuring Stephen Harper on parliamentary freedom, while leaving the Liberals alone, and we will get there soon enough.

In contrast, American congressmen enjoy so much more freedom of action because the executive and legislative branches are separate. When everybody is elected to a fixed term, non-confidence votes don’t exist. This frees up legislators, while increasing electoral stability. Just because one piece of legislation favoured by the President is voted down, it doesn’t mean the next one will be. In Canada, we need parliamentary discipline because the executive’s tenure is tied to parliamentary control. One lost confidence vote and you’re out. You want freedom of action for MP’s? Then you should want to sever the link between the executive and the legislature.

To this end I propose the following: a constitutional change whereby the executive power is transferred from the Prime Minister to the Governor General. In return, the Governor General becomes elected to a 4-year fixed term. Parliamentary elections are run concurrently with the GG election. In this way, confidence votes, and the attendant party discipline, are no longer required. MP’s would be free to vote on issues as they see fit. As a side benefit, the Governor General’s cabinet would be composed of his appointees confirmed by Parliament. This would allow federal departments to be run by subject-matter experts rather than by politicians who are elected merely to represent their riding and who may be completely unfamiliar with their departmental responsibilities, and who have to carry out their ministerial duties on the side. 

I think grass-roots conservatives would be well advised to concentrate on separating the executive from the legislature, over getting an elected Senate. The constitutional hurdles are just as daunting but the payoff in good government is much higher.

Rob Ford and Jack Layton: a tale of two politicians

With a week to go in the last Federal election, a story appeared in the press about the then-leader of the NDP, Jack Layton. He had been caught by the Toronto police in a massage parlour in the late 1990’s while he was a City of Toronto Councillor. After the shock of these revelations wore off, the media declared it no big deal, reassured by Jack Layton’s assertion that nothing untoward happened (i.e. no happy ending). Shortly thereafter, Jack Layton went on to achieve the greatest electoral success in NDP history.

Considering the fact that there was a police report in the Layton case but no police report (and indeed no evidence at all) in Rob Ford’s alleged crack smoking case, I wonder why the media was so lackadaisical and gullible in the former scandal while so doggedly persistent in the latter? A mystery, I tell you; a complete mystery.

 

P.S. An old friend who was a retired Toronto police officer once told me that the best thing that could happen to a police officer’s career would be for him to catch an alderman with a hooker. By this, he meant was that discretion on the cop’s part meant a new friend at City Hall. I wonder what the police officer’s career trajectory was like after his late-night encounter with Jack Layton as compared to before. We even know his name (he was interviewed at the time), but this is the kind of investigative reporting that the Canadian press is strangely reluctant to pursue.

How to balance security with freedom: seal the border

It is customary for the politician-candidate to loudly proclaim that security and freedom are not incompatible, but to change his minds in office, as James Taranto noted of President Obama: 

"As for our common defense," Barack Obama declared in his First Inaugural Address, "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. . . . Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

Last Friday the president said this: "I think it's important to recognize that you can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

The sad fact is, the officeholder, who often must select the least-worst option available, has a better perspective on reality than the candidate promising the world. Nevertheless, even though there is an unavoidable trade-off between liberty and security, it doesn’t follow that there aren’t different ways to trade security for freedom and that not all security measures are equally pernicious.

Consider the NSA spying scandal. While civil libertarians argue that programs such as PRISM are dangerous because they are open to abuse by those in charge, national security hawks contend that electronic surveillance is necessary to protect America from another 9/11. The security hawks have a point, but only if there is not another way to accomplish their goal of better security.

What I have in mind is this: instead of putting every US resident under a microscope 24/7, how about increasing border security, so that potential terrorists don’t come into the country in the first place? This would involve radically restricting visitor traffic and immigration from Islamist countries, diplomatically isolating those countries, shifting informatics resources away from the Utah Data Center towards a more robust no-fly list and sealing the border with Mexican. In this way, on one side of the border liberty can flourish unobstructed, while on the other side… who cares? Because the terrorists can’t come in.

Immigration proponents would counter that border crossings would become more intrusive as US Customs becomes ever more authoritarian. It would also make it harder for legal immigrants to visit their home country if their home country is Islamist. In addition, at the same time that it prevents terrorists from coming to America, it will also turn away good people from America, including many Christians who are currently persecuted in those lands. All of these are valid points. But if a trade-off between freedom and security is necessary and unavoidable, isn’t it incumbent on the policymakers to choose the least intrusive policies, and aren’t the negatives of what I propose preferable for American citizens to a massive domestic surveillance apparatus? With my proposal, most citizens are left entirely alone, with the oppressive aspects of security strictly confined to a restricted sphere: the border and beyond.

By ‘beyond’ I mean that my proposal is not incompatible with a robust War on Terror conducted elsewhere. To head off terrorists before they reach the border, the campaign of targeted assassinations, enhanced interrogations and human intelligence gathering, that the US is already conducting in Islamists countries, may continue. The leftists are wrong when they say waterboarding is corrosive to American values. It is not inconsistent with liberty at home, if in fact you do have liberty at home. 

The Utah Data Center and terrorist watch lists

The past week has seen revelations that the NSA is receiving telephone records of everybody in the US. It was also discovered that the US government is building a multibillion-dollar computer center for the NSA capable of storing computer data by the yottabyte.

In other news, the US government completely missed obvious clues and warnings about the Boston Marathon bombers. As well, the limitations of current no-fly lists have been well documented, with potential terrorists being able to get on airplanes unchallenged.

In yet other news, nobody has any clue as to who or what is flowing across the Mexican border on any given day.

In totally unrelated news, here is an academic definition with no real-world application: anarcho-tyranny is the state of affairs where the government is unable to perform basic core functions such as maintaining law and order, while at the same time behaving repressively towards its citizens.

The AP wiretap scandal is the least consequential of Obama’s sins

I have a hard time sympathizing with the Associated Press’ journalists who claim that Eric Holder’s search for government leakers is stifling their ability to do their job. These are the same people who champion every big government project that threatens to regulate to death the lives of every non-journalist in America. Go ahead and tie up the oil industry with red tape; go ahead and disarm the public; go ahead and muzzle the public with hate crime laws; it’s A-OK with us. But don’t you dare inconvenience us reporters. We’re journolists after all, and therefore the conscience of the nation. This is a threat to the First Amendment, you know.

I have news for the newspeople: we have freedom of the press, not freedom for the press. Freedom of the press means that everybody has a right to publish what they want – especially about politics, as long one abides by certain norms, long established in common law (i.e. you have no right to libel, spread obscenity, incite riots or reveal state secrets). Freedom for the press is a completely different matter. In this regime, you have separate castes who are granted special privileges. In this view, journalists are a kind of priesthood, not unlike those in ancient Egypt, who were treated like gods because they could read the future by analyzing the entrails of chickens. One suspects that mainstream journalists prefer the latter arrangement.

One problem with giving journalists legal rights not enjoyed by others, is the question of what defines a journalist. And more importantly, who gets to make the definition and rule on specific cases. One obvious answer is the government, an ominous answer. The government slaps more and more restrictions on Joe Blow’s freedom but professional reporters don’t care because it doesn’t affect them. They still have their legal exemptions, such as the freedom to withhold sources and the freedom to publish government secrets. They reason, most likely correctly, that the government wouldn’t dare deny an MSM employee a journalist license.

Just look at the scandal that finally awoke Obama’s sleeping press. An ambassador and three security personnel are left to die in Benghazi. Yawn. Two federal agents and 300 Mexican citizens are murdered by guns distributed by Operation Fast and Furious. Who cares? The New Black Panther party is caught on tape intimidating voters at a voting station and Eric Holder does nothing about it. What, are you paranoid? The IRS is crushing Tea Party groups with tax audits. Get the tin foil out of your hat. But collect the phone records of AP reporters and it’s Red Alert, Red Alert, we have a constitutional crisis.

Regardless of what it professes in public, what really concerns the media is not freedom of speech but the defense of corporatism - the system of government where the government has mutually beneficial relationships with large-scale establishments. Corporatism is related to authoritarianism and is a sub-totalitarian form of socialism. 

In a free society - a real free society - everybody is equal under the law: no separate castes or categories. If big-time journalists are given immunity from prosecution, then no-name bloggers have it as well. And if it is OK to strangle the asbestos industry or a gun range with red tape then it is OK to do the same to journalists. Or if it’s not OK, it’s not OK to do it to anybody.

Unlike the Senate expense scandal, Brent Rathgeber’s resignation is serious trouble for Harper

For the most part, I have been pooh-poohing many of the recent ‘scandals’ that have the Parliament Hill press corps in a lather. In contrast, I believe Brent Rathgeber’s departure from the Conservative caucus is serious because it is caused by a fundamental contradiction in Stephen Harper’s formula for success.

The simple fact is, the game of Parliament rewards unity and punishes independence. Take Preston Manning. A true believer in grass-roots populism, he gave his caucus a free hand. As a result, he was always blindsided by Nazi eruptions caused by undisciplined MP’s. Take the Bob Ringma affair, when Ringma opined in a newspaper interview that it should be legal for a small business to send gays and blacks “to the back of the shop”, presumably if they offend a customer. He was defending the right of free association (which I support) and the right to run your business your own way (which I also support), but their ham-fisted presentation that was enticed out of him by a clever interviewer validated every piece of left-wing agit prop made against the Reform Party. This is what happens when MP’s lack discretion. Unfortunately, the incident wasn’t isolated. As a result, the public began to see Chrétien as a leader, while the only thing Manning could lead was a clown car.

It was Stephen Harper’s wisdom to realize that this situation had to change if the Conservatives were to succeed. And he indeed changed it: he disciplined the ranks and success followed.

Speaking as an old-time Reformer, I must point out to Harper’s conservative critics that everything we have achieved so far – rebuilding the military, toughening the criminal code, cutting the GST, eschewing anti-Americanism, eliminating the gun registry, raising the retirement age, overhauling the immigration system, etc. – none of it wouldn’t have happened if Harper hadn’t been in charge for the last 7 ½ years. In his place, the Liberals, or worse, some left-wing coalition, would have done goodness knows what. Instead of eliminating the gun registry, perhaps we wouldn’t have any gun ownership at all left in Canada after the Newtown massacre. Any right-winger who criticizes Harper for his high-handedness (such as Matt Gurney) must come to terms with this. Please tell me how the Conservatives could have emerged triumphant after 5 years of minority government other than by running a top-down show?

Of course, it can be countered that the Conservatives don’t have party now either – witness Rathburger and Peter MacKay. True, but they did for 7½ years, which is more than Manning or Day ever achieved.

Having said all of this, it is nevertheless also clear that Harper has a serious problem that he must solve if he is to retain his majority. So what can he do? He could take a page from Brian Mulroney, circa 1991, and stubbornly plow ahead, all the while thinking, “where can they go?” The problem with this course of action is that, as Mulroney found out, they can leave the party, found an alternative party to compete with your party and decimate you through vote-splitting. That’s where they can go.

I think a more auspicious plan begins with Harper recognizing that Rathburger has a legitimate beef. He represents an important, perhaps the most important, faction of the Conservative Party of Canada and it would be suicide to continue to take for granted the support of these people. Not only do most of the party’s volunteers come from them, but they are also the backbone of the old Reform Party small donor base  - the principal reason the Conservative Party is the only political party able to thrive in an environment where big political donations are banned.

So how does Harper win them back? First of all, don’t apologize. That only makes you look weak at a time when you need to be seen as strong. 

The second requirement is a bit trickier: you must win them back without sacrificing outward party unity. How to square this circle? Normally, my political strategy is biased towards bold action and opposed to split-the difference solutions, which I contend are cowardly and indecisive. In this case, however, I think a careful path between the Scylla of the Bob Ringma Flying Circus and the Charybdis of one-man rule is required. 

How does Harper do this? 

I think he must engage independent-minded backbenchers quietly and substantively, but not publicly. He could placate them, not by letting them run free, but by offering them some substantive legislation. For instance, the immediate cause of Rathburger’s resignation was a sunshine law on civil servants’ salaries. This was a no-brianer, as it is likely also popular with the Low Information Voter. Taking it out of a bill before Parliament was a mistake that was walk-in-the-door dumb. Now Harper must play catch-up. He has to take a good hard look at what the old Reform faithful (like me) desire, and give us as much of it as is politically practical, while at the same time keeping a lid on the creative destruction of undisciplined bigmouths.

Psst, Stephen Harper, politics means never having to say you’re sorry

Michael Den Tandt, in the National Post, wrote an exceptionally silly piece about the Mike Duffy scandal. The article is a mock speech that, Den Tandt contends, Prime Minister Harper should have given over the $90,000 cheque his former chief of staff gave to Senator Mike Duffy to cover the reimbursement costs of his expenses. The speech is a cringing apology to the Canadian people over this mishandled fiasco.

What naïve advice.

While we flatter ourselves into believing that what we want are humble nice guys running our country who apologize for their transgressions, we don’t. We want leaders. We want to follow real men (even if they are women).

What the Low Information Voter despises most of all are weak men. And he is right to do so. What good is a cringing beta-boy to the country? Somebody who weeps and wails on Oprah every time his government screws up. Apologies are just plain weak.

I know this may sound un-Christian to some. It does, but only because it is unChristian. Nevertheless, what the country needs most of all is a leader who can rise above the hurly-burly of everyday politics and impose solutions on the country’s problems. Only a tough guy can do that.

If you think this is just a partisan defense of Stephen Harper, let me inject a bipartisan example to prove my point: Jean Chrétien. Did Karate Kretch every apologize for anything? No way. Did he do things that he should have been ashamed of? All the time: Shawinigate; Adscam; slandering Preston Manning as an extremist while poaching the very ideas that he said made Manning an extremist; and who can forget the Shawinigan handshake, when he - without any provocation - threw a protester on the ground to be pummeled by his bodyguards. Did he apologize to the country – or even to the left-wing punk for the teeth that the RCMP kicked out of his mouth? Nope. He just joked about the incident in a TV interview… and the public ate it up.

But say? Didn’t JFK apologize over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and wasn’t that popular? No. He took responsibility. He didn’t apologize. There is a difference. President Truman famously had a sign on his desk that said, “the buck stops here.” Did he ever apologize? Are you kidding? He was way too feisty for that. And he dropped the atomic bomb twice. 

All of which points to Harper’s way out of this mess. The root cause of the scandal are unelected Senators who, at least in the public’s mind, do nothing. If there were no appointed Senators, there wouldn’t be unaccountable lifers scamming their expense accounts. Go hammer and tongs on the Senate, champion direct elections for that august body and see this proposal all the way through, just as you have been promising since your Reform days.

In politics, you rise above your problems; you can’t apologize your way out of them. Just ask Lance Armstrong.

The Republican self-flagellation: an epic fail

The New York Post’s Michael Godwin likens the GOP’s rebranding efforts as an epic fail, comparing it to New Coke.

“Their action is the political equivalent of the New Coke debacle: Trashing your existing product and, by extension your customers, as a way to introduce a better product and get new customers.”

“Public Relations 101 teaches never to repeat a problem you’re denying, so the report’s authors deserve an “F” in marketing.

They didn’t merely make the work of liberal critics easy. They did their work for them.”

“The report notes all that, but its sad-sack, kick-me-again tone reeks of whimpering surrender. Accusing its party of having Latinos “pigeonholed into demographic outreach,” the report praises the way “Democrats have built relationships.”

Is this a plan for the future or a suicide note?”

This whole Latino outreach is a big red herring. The election had nothing to do with immigration or Latinos. You only first heard about the issue after the election – from the mainstream media and the Democrats.

If Romney’s tough line on immigration cost him the election, why didn’t amnesty-loving John McCain poll any better among Hispanics in 2008? And why does the border fence outpoll both failed presidential candidates? 

One factoid the pushers of this line of thinking are curious to not to repeat is that Romney got 7 million fewer votes from white males than the anemic McCain. But hey, the critical importance of the white male voter isn’t part of the Narrative.

“Without directly saying so, the 100-page document also oozes contempt for the Tea Party, which is odd on several levels. Without the Tea Party, Republicans would be a minority in the House.

And it’s the Tea Party, not the Washington establishment, that has produced most of the GOP’s leading minority members. Think Cuban-American Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, and Indian-American Govs. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina. And it was Haley who appointed Tim Scott to replace the retiring Jim DeMint, making Scott the first black senator from the South since the 19th century.

This is a genuine problem that can’t be blamed on MSM mischief-making. The Republican Old Guard is jealous of the Tea Partiers, as personified in McCain’s bitter diatribe against Rand Paul’s victorious filibuster.

The rage from many on the right reflects the ways the report foolishly incorporates liberal criticism that the most conservative members of the GOP are the problem. The result, for now, is that the clumsy effort to unite the party actually makes a split more likely.”

Bingo.

“It was also terribly timed. Republicans finally are winning something — the battle of the sequester, and thus showing the fallacy of the idea that all federal spending is sacred. But instead of stories about Obama canceling White House tours while wasting millions on golf trips and giveaways, the MSNBC crowd now has a new talking point: Republicans admit they’re awful people!"

The GOP isn’t called the Stupid Party for nothing.

"Other facts are worth remembering. There are 30 Republican governors and 25 of them enjoy Republican majorities in both houses of their legislatures. About 53 percent of the nation’s population lives in those states, against the 37 percent who live in the 15 states completely controlled by Democrats.”

As I have been saying for a while, the glass is half full for Republicans. The question is what are you going to do with that half-full glass? Fortunately, the Republicans in statehouses haven’t been listening to their betters in Washington, and so are proceeding to do much good work in undermining the blue-state model. 

Often, especially after a big defeat, the worst thing is not the defeat itself; it is the defeatism it engenders. The loss, in and of itself, is local. But ‘reform’ proscriptions can linger on, handicapping your team for years afterwards.

What should the Republicans in Washington do instead? According to columnist Michael Walsh, they can start fighting:

“Advice to the RNC: Don’t “re-brand.” Fight.”

He is right. Rebranding is just a marketing crock. It is another name for defeatism, and rears its head whenever you have been cut low. Ronald Reagan had to battle the same naïve, short-sighted thinking before he could begin the Reagan Revolution.

Walsh offers a number of proscriptions, but the best are: fight, get personal, put them on defense, fire failed consultants, get rid of old-timers like McCain, strike pre-emptively, aim for total victory and stop cringing. All excellent suggestions, especially the part about making the Dems go on defence and striking pre-emptively. Offense beats defence by a country mile.

But I add one more: stop taking advice from the enemy! Because that is what you do whenever you buy into to the ‘solutions’ graciously offered by the mainstream media. Why does the New York Times want the Republicans to thrive?