Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Read My Lips Stephane Dion: Women Are NOT Inferior

So, I understand that Stephane Dion wants to ensure that 1/3 of the Liberal candidates in the next election are women. Obviously he equates women MPs as some indicator of political equality in Canada.

This view is typically short-sighted of a Liberal. I would argue that because women have the right to vote, the right to participate in candidate selection, and the right to put their own name forward for nomination that they ARE indeed treated equal. Moreover, very little of what an MP does is gender-specific. Foreign policy, monetary policy, Inter-governmental affairs, Defense, etc. have no particular gender issues.

Jean Chretien tried this strategy in 1997. He decreed that a certain percentage of Liberal candidates were to be female (I think 25%) and he had to hand-pick candidates in some ridings to meet that goal. In doing so, he did an end-run around democracy by telling his party members in particular ridings who they needed to support. He parachuted Karen Redman in the Kitchener Centre riding and she won against a fractured Right and has won re-election ever since. But considering the incumbent advantage we CAN question if she ever deserved to be an MP in the first place. Ms. Redman may indeed deserve it but for her whole career I’ll wonder if she was the best person, well, Liberal for the job. And the fact that she was a Chretien lapdog didn’t help her credibility.

“Affirmative Action” is all around a bad idea. It IS a form of discrimination and not just against the able-bodied, heterosexual, white dude. It’s sexist in this case because it says ‘Women ARE inferior and need help to get elected’; it says ‘Women can’t compete in politics’.

I beg to differ. I don’t see that women are inferior or are at an inherent disadvantage. I don’t see that we need to prop them up. And I don’t think the electorate much cares about gender as a whole.

Case in point, I’m proud to say that in my riding Elizabeth Witmer represents me at Queen’s Park. And half of Waterloo City Council, including Mayor Brenda Halloran, is female.

Dion’s stand is insulting and cynical. He is pandering to the meek by using this non-issue to vote-grab. Anyone who votes Liberal because of this really has issues with priorities.

Friday, December 08, 2006

Why I Oppose Same-sex Marriage

For me, its not about rights or denying rights. Its about the Charter. Its about a slippery slope created by redefining a word. And its about parliamentarians abdicating their responsibility to permit the Electorate to drive social policy through them.

For decades (yes, under the Liberals) we’ve developed a culture whereby we expect the courts to essentially MAKE law by setting precedent. Then the legislative bodies, be they federal or provincial, have to make law to satisfy the new precedent.

The system is not supposed to work this way. Its supposed to go something like this. We (the Electorate) cast our ballots to elect members and parties who represent our values. Those representatives then go to Ottawa or Queen’s Park, or wherever and MAKE laws that express those values. And then the courts are supposed to simply interpret and apply those laws.

But when the courts, who are supposed to be independent of government and independent of the people, essentially create laws, they take the Electorate out of the equation. The courts now drive socially policy. That is a fact I am exceedingly uncomfortable with. Why do we still call our society a democracy? We are fooling ourselves if we do.

Now, about the Charter. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a tragically flawed document. It has noble intentions but is flawed. It is flawed because it can be used to support an argument in court for someone who has the audacity to say “My right to (whatever) supersedes your right to (whatever else).” Even if both rights can be interpreted as protected under the Charter; the one who whines wins.

Now, considering the tendency of Parliament to sit and wait for the courts to decide what it should do, can we really expect that they will have the strength or the inclination to intervene when a member of the Clergy is brought up on charges for infringing on the ‘rights’ of a same-sex couple when they demand to be married in a church and by that particular Clergy? This matter is all the more intractable given the perceived supremacy of the Charter. This will happen. Its only a matter of time. Indeed, people entrusted to perform secular marriages are already losing their jobs for refusing, on moral/religious grounds, to perform same-sex marriages.

I have a problem with the strategy of redefining the word ‘marriage’. Even France didn’t go so far. If it had been called a ‘civil union’, with all the same rights, privileges and duties as marriage, I would have been on-side. It would have been a whole lot cleaner to allow (not compel) clergy and secular bodies to perform either Marriages (between one man and one woman) or Civil Unions (between two people).

Another issue relates to the Charter and having taken the unnecessary step of redefining the word ‘marriage’. By doing so, we open the possibility of challenges, again argued under the Charter, for things like bigamy, polygamy, incest and such. Its only slightly less likely than the previous scenario. Its an unintended possibility not seen by those who did not have the foresight. Having to fight these challenges in court will be at the very least embarrassing. Imaging the headline; ‘Man challenges Canadian court to redefine marriage so he can marry his daughter’. And given how flawed the Charter is, these challenges could go either way. We’ve opened a Pandora’s box.

Democracy at work?

We don’t have Same-sex marriage in Canada because of any kind of groundswell of support by the people for the idea. I figure that the majority of voters in Canada either don’t care or oppose the idea. We have Same-sex marriage because of a few judges and three men in Ottawa. Jean Chretien and Gilles Duceppe, and Jack Layton whipped their members into voting as they were told. The Bloc and the NDP did it again yesterday, and the Liberals no doubt would have too if they thought it was needed. It was shamefully anti-democratic of the Liberals, the Bloc and the NDP. The only party to uphold democracy was mine. Conservative members were free to vote as they felt compelled to. Only Conservative members were free to listen to their constituents. We have Same-sex marriage at the cost of democracy, not because of it.

Yes, it was a victory for supporters of Same-sex marriage. But it was a defeat for democracy.

And, may I remind the reader that the Liberal Party as of six years ago opposed Same-sex marriage. Why? And why the turn-about if not as a cynical ploy to get more votes? The Liberal Party is certainly not the champion of civil rights in Canada. They are masters of social engineering though, I give them that. To do a total 180 on this matter, create the ‘need’ and give us Same-sex marriage in three short years is pretty amazing.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Dion: A question of loyalty

I was shocked to learn yesterday that newly-elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Stephane Dion, is a dual-citizen.

What was not shocking at all was his inability to understand why he MUST renounce his French citizenship.

It boggles the mind how someone who hopes to be Prime Minister someday can think that it is appropriate for him to hold the citizenship of another country. The logic is so simple, so instinctive, that I don’t even know where to start to explain it.

I don’t care that he doesn’t vote in French elections and I don’t care that he doesn’t have French passport. The fact of the matter is that he can vote and he can get a passport; its there for the asking.

Dion’s intransigence on the matter smacks of the same tired Liberal arrogance that we’ve spent the past decades putting up with in Canada. But it should not surprise us. It is, after all, coming from the man who was the Environment Minister while the Liberals signed the Kyoto Accord and then did nothing to reduce so-called greenhouse gases. (That ‘Global Warming’ is a fallacy is a whole other matter) Dion was also the Intergovernmental Affairs Minister while ‘Adscam’ was in full swing.

Its clear to me that integrity, or even the appearance of it, is not high on Dion’s mind.