Tohmas Cheney High Times for Grassfed Beef
Chris Selley's Full Pundit: The questionable relevance of Adolf Hitler
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Shall I compare thee to history's greatest monster?
'Twas another fine calendar week in Canadian politics.
Conrad Black, writing in the National Mail service, provides his latest ruminations on … well, merely about everything to practise with Canadian politics, really. Some highlights: Bob Rae, who "is equally vigorous as a teenager," isn't too old to lead the Liberals; Thomas Mulcair isn't too French to lead the New Democrats; "it would be a succulent irony, and somehow amiably Canadian, if the leader of the NDP were a one-time Liberal provincial cabinet minister (Mulcair) and the Liberal leader were a erstwhile NDP provincial premier (Rae)," though in fact the parties ought to merge. "The Conservative government, meanwhile, is proceeding majestically." And a national securities regulator "would be a mortally dangerous, unaccountable Frankenstein Monster like the SEC, lurching violently nigh."
Talking of the NDP leadership race, Postmedia's Stephen Maher thinks it's time for a few no-hopers to bow out — "I don't call back Martin Singh or Niki Ashton have the experience to be credible candidates as prime minister, and Paul Dewar's French isn't getting better fast plenty," he says — and requite the real contenders more air time to bash things out.
Ezra Levantin the Sun Media papers, Heather Mallickin the Toronto Star and Tabatha Southey in the The Globe and Mail service counterbalance in on Bourgeois MP Larry Miller's argument, in the House of Commons, that Hitler's fondness for gun command is very much relevant to the debate over Canada's long-gun registry. Wow. We can barely believe we only typed that judgement.
"As national security concerns have been freezing [Chinese-endemic] Huawei [Technologies Co. Ltd.] out of the information-engineering science industry in the United States, Huawei has quickly expanded in Canada," Terry Glavin notes in the Ottawa Citizen. "While Huawei'southward American operations have fallen afoul of the U.Due south. Committee on Foreign Investment, Canada abolished its ain Strange Investment Review Bureau years ago. While U.S. police lists the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps" — a client of Huawei'due south Iranian partner — "as a terrorist entity, Canadian constabulary does not." Aye. It's … bad-mannered.
Only then, as Paul Wells writes in Maclean's, the whole thing is awkward. Canada's sudden interest in the Chinese economic system goes with its chest-thumping foreign diplomacy sanctimony similar chalk goes with cheese. "The Conservatives accept taken to describing Canada'southward petroleum exports every bit 'ethical oil,' but the Chinese are fabulously unfussed by such considerations," Wells argues. "As Western countries divest in Iran to protest, and seek to curtail, the ruling regime'due south nuclear ambitions, Chinese companies have moved into the vacuum. … [And] it will, it seems, proceed opposing Western attempts to use sanctions to bring the oppressive regime in Syria to heel." Information technology'southward not all that nice to its own citizens, either. And yet here nosotros are. As Wells says, nowadays, the difference betwixt Harper'south and Jean Chrétien's approaches to Chinese relations seem to exist mostly in the former's head.
And now it's fourth dimension to play Hands Refutable Pundits' Claims! Today'south contestant is Murray Dobbin, writing for The Tyee, who in the course of lambasting the Harper government's amateur-hour foreign policy, contends that "Harper treats all Palestinians, fifty-fifty elected representatives, every bit if they were terrorists," and that "while Canada'due south official position on a two-state solution (based on 1967 borders) hasn't changed, Harper refuses to utter the phrase."
"Our government believes in a ii-state solution." -Harper, in an October 2006 speech to B'Nai B'rith
"Our back up for [Israel's] right to self-defense force is unequivocal, just as we support a 2-state solution in the Eye Due east." -Harper, in a June 2008 speech, also to B'Nai B'rith
"President Obama emphasized that in a ii-state solution, one of those states has to be a Jewish state … another is that the Palestinian state must be a demilitarized state. … I recollect if you lot wait at the statement in its totality, it was very balanced and it is certainly something that Canada can support." – Harper in May 2011
Send in your own!
The torture debate
Postmedia's Andrew Coyne argues in that location is an obvious moral divergence between the "ticking time flop" scenario that argues confronting a blanket prohibition on torture, and the scenario that played out in Ottawa terminal week afterward a memo was unearthed in which Public Safety Minister Vic Toews authorized the apply of torture-derived information "in exceptional circumstances." "In this instance the situation is the reverse: you've been handed the ticking time bomb, and are wondering if torture was the source," Coyne writes. "And if it was, well, the torture has already occurred. Someone else has already crossed that vivid [moral] line." Information technology would exist "morally birdbrained" to ignore such information on principle, says Coyne, and nosotros concord. If you inquire us, any politician who tells you he'd ready fire to that information is completely full of it.
Perhaps more to the signal, it probably isn't ever going to happen like that. "Ticking-time-flop cases are and then rare equally to be almost not-existent," the Star'south Thomas Walkom argues, and therefore information technology'south lightheaded to debate Canada'southward policies on the thing in such overblown terms. The existent danger in Toews' memo, Walkom says, is that Canada continues to "outsource" torture to foreign intelligence services, and gets cute with the definition of "exceptional circumstances." Nosotros agree completely.
Ontario's pit of shame
Based on what the Globe's Adam Radwanski has been able to glean, Don Drummond's report on Ontario's financial troubles — due out Midweek — is long on recommendations (400 of them!) and short on suggestions of how exactly to implement them. "Those familiar with the inner workings of regime suggest at that place simply aren't enough willing or able bodies to drive dozens of reforms at once, permit solitary 400 of them," says Radwanski. This is a bit of a trouble, as he says — not for Drummond, just for the Liberals, who commissioned his report and volition have to live with the fallout.
Marcus Gee in the Globe, and Royson James in the Star, behold the astonishing ineptitude with which Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is pursuing his transit agenda, if you tin even call it that. God, what a mess.
Duly noted
George Jonas, writing in the Mail service, blames "old Canada's nation-building WASP and French elites" for weakening our traditional freedoms, not least by codifying them in the Charter, but seems concerned that recent immigrants, in changing "what [Canada] is" (as they obviously will exercise), volition bugger the whole thing upwards. Frankly, we don't get it. He wishes Canada had developed into the antonym of the "statism" that he fled in Hungary in 1956, instead of adopting a watered-down version of information technology. Fine. But why does he assume modern immigrants, many of whom are themselves fleeing tyranny, don't also yearn for unvarnished freedom?
And finally, Joe Schwarcz, writing in the Montreal Gazette, defends the "pink slime" that McDonald's has used as filler in its American (not Canadian) hamburgers against pseudo-scientific attacks by people similar celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. This results in one of our favourite sentences of the year: "Imploring people to defection against the utilise of ammonia-treated beefiness slurry is a misguided attempt to amend eating habits through scare tactics."
National Post
Chris Selley: • cselley@nationalpost.com | cselley
Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selleys-full-pundit-the-questionable-relevance
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