Conservatives Win in Canada

Here is what the election results look at this point:

Even though the outcome is obvious, you can still consult the updated numbers here.

Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Canadian Liberals, is so unappealing as a politician that he managed to drag his party down to the third place. The second place is now firmly occupied by the NDP. For those of you who do not follow Canadian politics, if Ralph Nader could organize a viable political party in the US, it would be the American version of the Canadian NDP. 

What the results of this election tell us is that Canadian progressives are an overwhelming majority in the country. At this point, their vote is split between the old and corrupt Liberals and the new and hopeful NDP. Today's victory of the Conservatives is not a victory at all, in my opinion. This is the very last chance they get to grab for power. Soon, the progressives will get their shit together and take our country back. And if you want to tell me otherwise, do it on some other day. Today, I've got to believe this.

Canadian Conservatives Resort to Anti-Immigrant Propaganda

This is a commercial for the Conservative party that is being run in Quebec. I found it on Canukistani's blog. The commercial is, obviously, in French but there are English subtitles.

I thought the commercial was bad but then I read some of the comments that people left to this video on YouTube and realized that things were much worse than I could have ever imagined based just on the ad. Here are some highlights:

You really have the wrong idea about foreigners. Wish them well but encourage them to make something of their OWN country. If they don't show the Pioneer Initiative OUR ANCESTORS did, they are not worthwhile as people here.

The illegal immigration problem is so blatant. There was a ship from Fujian full of nothing but teen girls. B.C. had to spend money to make them wards of the state and pay 11x more a month per head than they pay a native for welfare. But the intention is for those girls to become WHORES; their families can be threatened by gangs in China. They phone up a girl (who by now has perfect English diction and education) and say, "Start whoring or we cut your mom's fingers off."

 I'm sure oil-executives want to screw over the environment because it's going to create "a better life" and a fatter stock portfolio for their children. Forget the "better life" rap, it's just greed.  No one comes to Canada to work harder and earn LESS, it's always for more. Crime is so easy in Canada with the fat, helpless pigeons we have here, eager to answer telephone scammers with bad accents calling from a boiler-room. 20% of immigrants come here for crime.

I tired of immigrants walking into Canadian asking for money, a house and medicare and we give it to them and they do SHIT ALL! "Don't ask what Canada can do for you, but ask what you can do for Canada".

their family members who (without a proper background check by the government) possibly will come here without the proper necessary skills to contribute economically and a culture that will make them refuse to integrate. All creating a heavy economic and social burden on Canadian society. *Sigh*

The problem with Canada back then (and even now) is that it accepted a huge amounts of refugees and asylum seekers without identifying who these people are, how they can contribute to the country, and how they can settle them probably. These failures resulted in increasing crime, decrease in personal safety, and quality of life in refugee infested neighborhoods in my case. Canada as a prosperous, free, and democratic country has a humanitarian obligation to accept refugees and asylum seekers....

this commercial is not such a bad thing. It is true that criminals and immigrants take advantage of our weakness. It is funny though that people call harper a racist because he wants to crack down on illegal immigration. People who come here on a boat dont just get the tright to stay, its not fair, they should apply for immigration and not just be able to stay here and waste millions our tax payer dollar because they come over in a boat.

And there is a lot more in the same vein. I really didn't expect such blatant hypocrisy, bigotry and sheer unadulterated stupidity from Canadians. Is this what just a few years of Conservative rule do to people?

Dr. Antonio Calvo's Tragedy: Could It Have Been Avoided?

What happened to Dr. Calvo who killed himself after being fired in a really nasty way by Princeton University is truly tragic. The question that, of necessity, is on everybody's mind is what can be done to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future. At-will firing that is the norm in the US is a horrible, inhumane practice. People can be told to clear their work spaces and leave without any warning whatsoever. Often, they are escorted from the premises by security guards and prevented even from saying good-bye to their colleagues of many years. In academia, getting fired between the months of April and September also means that you will not be able to go on the job market until it reopens on September 15. Furthermore, you will not be able to start working until September of the year after that. People who are not US citizens face almost immediate deportation after their work visas are revoked. Obviously, this system implies a lot of pain and suffering for the employees. Workers have to live in a constant fear of dismissal which takes a huge emotional toll.

Unions seem to offer a solution to this issue. They will protect employees from getting kicked out with no warning. However, unions have their problems, too. As important as it is to protect the rights of the employees, it is equally crucial that employers are protected as well. Unions make it extremely hard to dismiss bad employees and reward the good ones. To give an example, the union prevented my department from offering a monetary reward to a stellar instructor on the grounds that every member of the union should be compensated equally. And all my whining about how hard it is to get students to speak Spanish in class? This issue would be easy to solve if it weren't for the union.

It seems like the only productive solution to balancing the needs of both workers and employees is to have a disinterested third party that will impose a system of regulations to protect everybody. That third party has to be the government. Take Canada, for example. I'm not a complete and utter apologist of Canada, in any way or manner. However, it is evident to me that the way Canadians deal with the issue is quite productive. There is a system of regulations in place that outlines how, when and for what reasons an employee can be fired. People are also provided with a financial cushion that transforms the loss of a job from a tragedy into nothing more than an annoying temporary setback.

Contrary to Libertarian beliefs, this did not hamper Canadian job market in any way. Compared to what we see in the US today, the situation with employment in Canada is quite good.

Canadian Elections: The Debate

Here is the picture of Canadian leaders who debated yesterday as part of their campaign for the upcoming elections in Canada. I saw it and realized that Canada is screwed and will continue to be so while this is what the country's politics continues to look like.

Elections in Canada

I've been trying for a while to write a post on the upcoming elections in my country. However, I have to confess that I have been away from Canada for a while now and feel rather out of touch with its political scene. Canada has been impacted by the global financial crisis a lot less than the US*. Housing prices dropped a little for a while, but then started showing signs of growth again. In Quebec, real estate prices were never as inflated as in the US, of course, which made the drop in value of real a state a lot less dramatic. 

In terms of employment, there was a moment when people started getting laid off and finding a new job was difficult. Now, however, things seem to be back to normal. My sister, who lives in Montreal, felt so comfortable about the business of recruiting people that she left a very high-paying position with a well-established company to start her own recruiting company. 

Unlike the American shoppers, the Québécois customers still consume like there is no tomorrow. The last time that I visited Montreal I was (pleasantly) surprised to see that stores, coffee-shops and restaurants were filled with people to the extent where you could hardly get inside. 

Of course, even though Canada got through the crisis with relatively few losses (compared to the US), there are still massive problems in the country. Canadians at large seem to be completely out of sync with the Conservative agenda of Harper's Tories. Canada's conservatives would be considered commie-pinko Liberals in the US. However, their views are still too medieval for the majority of the country's population. Still, Harper and Co managed to stay in power since 2006 because Canadians are sick and tired of the overblown, ridiculously huge federal government and of the endless and unashamed corruption of the Liberals**.  Now that it has become clear that the Tories have no intention (or no wherewithal, as the case may be) to either avoid being as corrupt as the Liberals or to get the unwieldy government apparatus under control, new elections loom on the horizon.

Liberals have promised really fantastic things in their election platform. Huge amounts of money for education, creation of new professorial positions, and daycare services caught my attention. Are these promises enough, however, to attract voters to the Liberals' side? Is there a viable alternative to the Conservatives versus Liberals dichotomy that has plagued the political scene of both the US and Canada?

Please share your thoughts on the future of the best country in the world :-) whether you are Canadian or not.

* Most of my information is based on what is happening in Quebec and partly in Nova Scotia, which might not always be representative of the country at large, of course.

** As in every other post, I express my own views here. People might have a very different interpretation of what is going on in Canadian politics.

York University Persecutes a TA for Expressing Her Thoughts

I'm getting more and more disappointed with Canadian universities. Take, for example, the following story that is developing at Toronto's York University right now:

A York University tutorial assistant (TA) is under investigation after comments deemed unprofessional were posted to her Facebook page concerning the academic level of her tutorial students. The TA in question, Bianca Baggiarini, posted comments to her Facebook status Feb. 22. They stated, “My student’s papers are making me dumber, so very stupid; by the minute. Please, make them, stop. They are infecting me with there huge and apparent stupidity, and I fear they will start to effect in my opinion the way I myself right papers [sic].” . . . The situation is currently being examined by the department of sociology. . . The comments were taken down March 10 and are no longer visible for the public to see. However, social science TA Hans Rollmann says students may not be able to trust the TA after seeing the comments. “I think it demonstrates a real lack of respect for students,” said Rollman, a graduate student in women’s studies. “How can students trust that someone is going to have their best interests in mind and be trying to help them in that course if they are making fun of them behind their back?”

I have written before that, in my opinion,  sociologists don't have much to do in terms of conducting interesting research. At York University, they are obviously even less occupied with anything useful if time is wasted on investigating employees' Facebook pages. 

This case is problematic for a variety of reasons. First, it shows an utter disrespect on the part of York University for its employees' freedom of speech. The Department of Sociology at York University is forgetting that it has no right to censor and police the utterances of its employees that are made in their own free time. If anybody is being extremely disrespectful of the basic human rights of an employee, it's York University. 

At the same time, it is disturbing to see how far some educators would go in order to infantilize students. When these students graduate and begin to work, they will discover that during a process of review at their companies, they will hear much harsher things about their performance. Teachers who baby their adult students and never expose them to any criticism of their output are doing them no favor. If they are too traumatized by hearing that, collectively, they don't perform well, what will happen to their tender psyches when they hear their individual evaluations at their performance reviews in the workplace?

It is also extremely sad that, instead of hiring TAs who can write a sentence without making several egregious mistakes and admitting students who are not so stupid as to drive their teachers up a Facebook wall, York University is concentrated on punishing people for expressing their thoughts. As educators, we are obligated to teach our undergraduate and graduate students alike to express their thoughts well. We are not, however, supposed to police the content of their thoughts.

What happens when a university begins to persecute its employees for speaking is the sad phenomenon that you can observe in the following statement by Nancy Mandell, Chair of the hapless Department of Sociology:

“I can’t comment on that [...] I can’t comment on anything that comments on her behaviour,” said Mandell. “I can only tell you we’re looking into it, and there are a range of things that might occur. But I can’t comment on what they might be.”

Apparently, it isn't only TAs but also professors at York University who can't create a sentence that doesn't sound ridiculous. It is also terrifying to see a scholar (even one who is uncomfortable with using language) who is so bullied by her university into being afraid to say anything that she repeats "I can't comment" three times in one short utterance.

Shame on you, York University!

Misogyny Flares Up at University of Waterloo in Canada

For some reason, today everybody is sending me links about instances of misogyny in Canada. Look at this poster that somebody plastered over the faces of female candidates for student government:

This wasn't all. The following mass email was next sent in the name of the university's president:

When a bad idea comes to this Earth it always hides behind The Shield of Vulnerability. This way it is immune from being attacked in the open. Radioactive Technology was hiding behind the vulnerable looking mask of Marie Curie and this is why no one caught it in advance. They figured that if a female was pushing it then it was harmless. They figured wrong. The truth is that overeducated women are truly dangerous. If they don't know right from wrong they will nuke the whole Planet and call it the latest fashion from Holt Renfrew. This is the truth. The world is in trouble today because the higher moral intelligence of men is not in charge anymore. How long will you let this continue? The choice is in your hands. I didn't leave posters on your campus because I am a fool. I left them because I am your father who is concerned about where your education is ultimately going. You are being taught the virtues of gender equality when gender equality is nowhere in the Orginial Plan of Creation. Queen Elizabeth is leading you astray and charging you big money for this evil favour. When you graduate from here you will have a degree but no real intelligence. This is the truth.

Before you dismiss this as an innocent student prank, let me remind you of the Montreal massacre where 14 women were killed by a criminal who was unhappy with the fact that many women were attending an engineering program. 

Thank you, dear colleague, for sending me the link!

Fox News Is Not Coming to Canada - For Now

Really great news from Canada:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

In your face, Harper! In your face, Fox News! Yay for my fellow Canadians who have proven yet again that they deserve the name of civilized, progressive people.

Just consider how bankrupt today's Conservatives are if they freely admit they need lies to support their agenda:

Harper's attempts to make lying legal on Canadian television is a stark admission that right wing political ideology can only dominate national debate through dishonest propaganda. Since corporate profit-taking is not an attractive vessel for populism, a political party or broadcast network that makes itself the tool of corporate and financial elites must lie to make its agenda popular with the public.

I'm glad that Canadians showed Fox News exactly where it can stick its ridiculous propaganda. Of course, now we have to prepare for yet another assault on Canadian laws guaranteeing that newscasts are limited to broadcasting news instead of spreading lies.

Thank you, Angie, for sending me the link to this hopeful article!

Canukistani's Canadian Style Maple Syrup: A Recipe

Canukistani, a fellow Canadian and a reader of this blog, noticed that I haven't posted any recipes in a while, and gave me the gift of the following great post to share with everybody. It is not only useful, it's funny like hell. I laughed so hard, I'm in actual pain right now. Enjoy! And never say that Canadians don't have a sense of humor ever again. Thank you, Canukistani!!

Canadian Style Maple Syrup

(Eat your heart out Martha Stewart)

This is my recipe for making Maple syrup from scratch. You might wonder why not just buy it at the store. This stuff is damn expensive! Here’s a graph of the cost in various cities. And you think gas is pricey.

You’ll need: a map, 20 – 40 tree taps (sprules), 20 – 40 metal buckets with lids, drill, 7/16 “drill bit, hammer, 3 foot cloth measuring tape, two helpers, a cord of wood, three large iron kettles, hooks and iron chains, saw, axe, beer, thermometer, brix refractometer, filter sieve, oven mitts, tent, sleeping bags, shotgun, lamps, more beer and a variety of glass bottles with lids. One item which you won’t recognise is a tree tap or sprule.

This can be purchased at a Canadian Tire depot with dollars or Canadian Tire money which is Canada’s real currency.

 

One item which you won’t recognise is a tree tap or sprule.

This can be purchased at a Canadian Tire depot with dollars or Canadian Tire money which is Canada’s real currency. 

You may have not come across a brix refractometer either. Ditto Canadian Tire.

The first item on the agenda is to travel to an area which actually has sugar bush. 

Good weather for sap production is night temperatures in the 20s F and sunny days with temperatures in the 40s F. This alternate freezing and thawing temperature cycle (which can also cause potholes on roads) causes the pressure changes inside the tree that makes the sap flow. If the night time temperatures are too cold, it takes a longer time for the sap to warm up and ‘run’ in the daytime. If the temperatures are very cold, the sap may not run at all.

WARNING! You might run into bears which have just wakened up from hibernation and are HUNGRY. Safety first. Bring at least one person who can’t run as fast as you. If you’re particularly Machiavellian buy insurance with yourself as the beneficiary. Alternatively do a Sarah Palin and arm yourself with a short barreled SxS 12 gauge with Remington Buckhammer slugs – don’t retreat. Reload!

Learn to recognize the right trees. Tapping an elm tree is pointless and embarrassing. The main maple producing tree is known as the Sugar Maple, or Hard Maple ( acer saccarum) which is the best provider of the highest quality sap. It grows as tall as 100 feet. A few of the other main types of maple trees are The Red Maple (acer rubrum), The Silver Maple (or Soft Maple) and The Ash Leafed Maple (or Box Elder) You may need to enlist the help of the indigenous people. They are friendly and will trade for Canadian Tire money.

Local and two specimens of H. Canukistanus (two of my daughters)

 Depending on the tree's diameter and strength, it may be fitted with as many as three (3) taps. Use the cloth tape to measure the diameter. Trees with trunks less than 25 cm in diameter should not be tapped at all. Prudent tapping is harmless to the maple. Each tap will produce 10 gallons over a six week period.

Drill 1 cm (7/16") holes about 5 cm (2-2 1/2") into the trunk of the tree. Use the hammer to place the sprules into the tree. The sap will deteriorate if not attended to. The sap must be boiled the same day it is gathered, so a hot and steady fire is kept going at all times.

The "boiling down" process is slow - sometimes continuing far into the night. Bring lots of beer. Evaporation that is too slow or too fast will affect the color, flavour and texture of the syrup. At sea level, the correct temperature for evaporation is 104ºC. However, since the boiling point varies with altitude, a thermometer must be used to adjust the cooking temperature. For example, in a region where the boiling point of water is 98ºC (or 2ºC below normal), the cooking temperature of the sap must also be reduced by 2ºC (to 102ºC

I use the three kettle method where I put the raw sap which has the consistency of water into the first kettle and then transfer the more concentrated sap into the second. Repeat from the second kettle to the third where the final evaporation takes place. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. If you use maples other than the sugar maple, the syrup will be darker because the other trees have a lower concentration of sugar and the boiling will take longer.

Maple syrup must be filtered to remove the impurities that could affect its appearance and flavour. Orlon or felt make good filters. Filters should be cleaned with hotwater only (no detergent) and dried thoroughly before and after each use. New filters must be washed before use. Bottles or jars used to store syrup should also be cleaned and rinsed prior to bottling. It is important to adjust the density to between 66º and 67º Brix (the Brix unit of measurement indicates the risk of fermentation or crystallization). Use the brix refractometer. The syrup is then bottled or put in galvanized metal cans while still very hot (87ºC or more). The heat sterilizes the containers and prevents the formation of mold.

You can use maple syrup as a replacement for sugar in any recipe.

Drug Insanity Spreads to Canada

One of the scariest things in the US is the cavalier attitude that people have towards drugs. There is this wide-spread conviction that guzzling pills is an acceptable response to pretty much everything. Free samples of pain-killers are distributed in coffee shops, TV commercials exhort people to "ask their doctor" about a new pill that will cure them of everything, "the purple pill" is advertised as an aesthetic object that should be desirable regardless of whether you have the disease it is supposed to cure, personal qualities such as shyness are declared "syndromes" that require medication, doctors are genuinely shocked to discover that a 34-year-old patient doesn't take any prescription or over-the-counter medication, people think it is weird not to have a medicine cabinet in one's house, medication that hasn't gone through a rigorous safety testing regularly appears on the market and causes harm to innumerable pill-lovers.

Canadians have been looking at this pill-popping insanity, and have decided that they want something like that, too. Well, not all Canadians, of course. Just the ones at Health Canada who have been working hard to dismantle the system of safety measures that should prevent untested, dangerous medication from flooding the market:

Health Canada is holding its third and final “technical consultation” on proposals to “modernize” regulations governing prescription drugs and medical devices. The closed-door meetings will take place this week in Ottawa (Jan. 19-21). The Canadian public is largely unaware of the proposed changes, let alone their profound implications. Health Canada is working behind the scenes with the drug industry and drug industry funded groups to lower the drug safety standards and speed new drugs to market, thereby increasing the likelihood that Canadians will be exposed to dangerous new drugs. The proposed technical changes to drug regulation are part of a broader plan to introduce new legislation based on risk management and a lower standard of safety which will replace the current Food and Drug Act, which has as its central aim the protection of public health. The precautionary principle will be scrapped and the burden of proof will be shifted. So, instead of the drug industry having to demonstrate their product is safe, new drugs will be presumed safe and harm will have to be proven.

If that weren't bad enough, there is also a concerted effort on the part of pharmaceutical companies to legalize the advertisement of prescription drugs to consumers. According to Arthur Schafer, the director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, there is a strong push to allow in Canada the same kind of irresponsible advertisement for drugs that we see in the US:

Big Pharma is also lobbying hard for the abolition of current Canadian regulations prohibiting direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. Experience from the United States and New Zealand -- so far the only two countries to permit DTC advertising -- demonstrates these ads are a highly successful tool for the industry to persuade people to "ask your doctor" for the latest and most expensive products. Tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on campaigns for drugs. Industry calls this "public education" but it's an education which invariably exaggerates benefits and downplays harms. If/when DTC drug advertising is approved in Canada, the costs to our health-care system will escalate dramatically. At the same time, deaths from prescription pharmaceuticals will become even more common, as will a range of serious side effects. 

We have all seen how ridiculously low the standards for such advertisement are in the US. A drug appears on the market, we are flooded with commercials promising all kinds of benefits and mumbling over the side effects. Then another commercial appears, qualifying what was said in the first commercial. After a while, we hear that the drug has been pulled off the market and we can join a class-action suit against its makers. Now this mess is coming to Canada. 

What a shame.

Things That Suck in Canada

I love Canada, but there are three things that suck something fierce in my country (no, this post will not talk about taxes): banks, cell phone connections, and the Internet. These three areas are monopolized, which is never good because when there is a monopoly, competition dies. And when there is no competition, there is no incentive to provide goods and services that are even marginally decent.

Canadian banks charge you for every breath you take. Depositing, withdrawing, having an account - everything carries a fee. They mess up, steal your money, and charge you for this transaction. (This actually happened to me. National Bank of Canada stole $1,000 from me, and I could do nothing to get it back. They even recognized they messed up, but that money has never been recovered. By me, that is.) 

They also have this weird policy of "freezing" any money you deposit. I deposit some money in cash, and can't have access to it for days. If you deposit a check, it's frozen at least for a week. If the check is American, your money is frozen for 30 days. I once deposited a check from the Treasury of the US in the amount of $250. And then I had to wait for 30 days for it to clear. I mean, I know the US Treasury is not in great shape, but you can reasonably expect it to be able to clear a $250 check, right? After I moved to the US, I kept bugging bank tellers, unable to believe how easy banking was in the US: "So you are saying that I can deposit this check and have access to my money immediately? Like, right now? Like, this very moment? For real?" 

Canadian Internet banking is a story that I'll keep for another day because it's too bizarre. And if you dare to lose your bank card, woe betide you. You will be tortured and abused by the condescending bank tellers to the degree where you will start considering how great life was before the banking system came into existence.

The cell phone services in Canada are equally nasty. The quality of the connection sucks. Canadians know that there are specific places in their houses, apartments, offices, streets, where cell phone connection just dies. Every conversation I have with my sister who lives in Montreal is punctured by her saying "OK, I'm gonna get disconnected now. OK, the connection is about to drop again. Don't hang up if the sound disappears, it might get back up in a minute." And the cost of having a cell phone has always been sky-high. When I moved back to Canada for a year in 2007-8, I could never understand my cell phone bill. I kept thinking that somebody put the wrong number of zeros on the amount I owed. My happy-go-lucky American habit of blabbing on the cell phone all day long had to be abandoned.

The Internet connection is also expensive, slow and bad. In the US, you can always catch some free Wi-Fi somewhere, but in Canada it’s all password protected. Even in Starbucks, you can’t get free Wi-Fi. Every time I go back to Canada, I prepare to struggle with the Internet connection. As a blogger in the US, I'm used to being able to blog from pretty much anywhere. In Canada, though, I always feel disconnected from the world. Every trip to Canada is spent in a frantic search for a connection. And even if you are fortunate enough to find one, prepare for it to drop for no apparent reason at the worst moment possible.

As if things weren't bad enough as it is, Canadian monopolists are now trying to make the Internet connection even harder to get and even more expensive:

The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges. The move is sure to stifle digital creativity in Canada while the rest of the world looks on and snickers.

 This is so wrong, people.

Saving the Intergrity of Canadian Journalism: Action Needed

A while ago I blogged about the attempts to introduce Fox News in Canada. Now there is an important development which doesn't bode well for the future of Canadian journalism. This is what Canukistani, the reader who alerted me to the news, wrote in his comment:

I’d like to make an update based on an article in the Toronto Star today. A piece by Stephen Scharper stated that the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission) “is seeking to relax restrictions concerning the broadcasting of specious information on radio and television.” Currently a Fox news or right wing American style radio shows cannot exist in Canada because the law stipulates that broadcasters “shall not broadcast any false or misleading news.” Last month the CRTC put a notice on its website that it wants to modify this law to “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.”

Now, this is very important. For now, we, the citizens of Canada, are protected by the laws of our country from an advent of irresponsible propaganda-mongers ready and willing to spread lies without any concern for the truth. If you have had any sort of consistent exposure to Canadian newscasts, you couldn't have failed to notice that Canadian newschannels differ greatly from their American counterparts in that they actually transmit news. Not political spin. Just news. Today we are about to lose all that. The result will be sad for all of us:

So who decides which information is false and endangers the public or is false and just funny entertainment for the masses? - A triumvirate appointed by (guess who?) our Conservative government. Of course we have nothing to worry about based on their long and distinguished commitment to transparency and evidence based policy i.e. two prorogations of parliament in one year, eliminating the census, increasing spending on prisons due to an increase in unreported crime. I could continue but I think that you get the picture. I can see in the near future where this new news channel which starts broadcasting in March could call the Liberal party a communist front organization which wants to bring a Soviet style regime to Canada while the CBC, referred to by conservatives as the Communist Broadcasting Company could not offer an accurate rebuttal without the threat of having its licence removed.

It is not too late, though. We can still act and at least try to prevent this from happening. Let's not allow Fox News come into Canada and spread its lies and propaganda. We don't need to subvert our own laws to help this unfair and imbalanced mouthpiece of hysterical right-wingers everywhere move into our country. Let's act! We only have until February 9 to make our opinions known, though, so there isn't much time left:

At a time of increasing economic turmoil and insecurity for the majority of citizens in North America, we seem to have a developing anti-democratic impulse on the right. Is a Kristallnacht coming? The CRTC is accepting comments on its proposed ruling change until Feb. 9. For information on how to submit comments, follow this link.

 Thank you, Canukistani! I would have missed this without you for sure.

The Rich vs the Dying in British Columbia

What kind of a monster can possibly oppose the building of a terminal care facility? Well, apparently a rich one. Most people thought that building a hospice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada was a great idea, but the owners of expensive condos in a nearby building disagreed:

A plan to build a hospice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver has run into opposition from luxury condo owners nearby. The proposal calls for a 15-bed palliative care facility, called St. John Hospice, to be built next to a high-rise condominium building called the Promontory.

The cost of a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom condo in the building is $1,599,000, which is a lot for Canada. It seems like the owners of these luxury condos believe that the dying people should remove themselves as far away from them as possible in order not to mar the rich people's enjoyment of existence.

In itself, this story is not surprising. We are used to gated communities, to the perennially growing hysterical desire of the rich to isolate themselves from. . . well, life and everything that defines it. Since death is an inescapable attribute of every life, it is not remarkable that the rich in Vancouver should want to pretend to themselves that their money will allow them to buy their way out of a coffin and go on living forever. What's curious in this case is how readily the condo owners' opposition to the creation of a hospice has been blamed on some of them being Chinese:

One condo owner said most residents in the building are of Asian descent and believe living close to a hospice will bring bad luck. "In Chinese culture, we are against having dying people in your backyard," said Janet Fan, who has signed a petition against the hospice. "We cannot accept this. It's against our belief, against our culture. It's not culturally sensitive." Fan also said many residents worry about additional traffic and having to discuss the subject of death with their children.

As I predicted the other day, we will be hearing such stories about big, bad, scary, mean Chinese who abuse children and refuse the terminally ill the right to die with dignity more and more often. I don't know if Ms. Fan really said something this monstrous, and if she did, whether anybody in her building agreed with such a nasty worldview. But I have no doubt that such stories will do nothing to quell the rising anti-Chinese sentiments in North America.

Fox News in Canada

When I first moved to the US from Canada, it took me a while to figure out which TV channels were worth watching. Once, I was really tired after a long day at school and felt like watching some comedy. After flipping through a dozen channels, I alighted at a program that was absolutely hilarious. It was a brilliant parody of a newscast, where "journalists" offered a set of completely Medieval beliefs as "facts", introducing them with a phrase "some people say. . ." and opening their eyes very wide, as if that were supposed to lend credence to the junk they were spouting. There was also this hilarious gentleman who parodied the process of interviewing a guest. He kept chattering in a completely crazy way, never letting the interviewee get a word in, raising his voice to the point of screaming, and offering a barrage of disjointed and completely ridiculous statements. I had a blast watching it and shared my discovery of this fantastic comedy channel with my American friends. They burst my illusion, though, by informing me that this was supposed to be an actual news channel. This is how I discovered Fox News.

As if it weren't enough that so many Americans made complete fools out of themselves believing that Fox News had anything to do with news reporting, we will now get our own Fox News channel in Canada:

"It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV," Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said as the conservative news channel faces stiff competition from existing cable news channels operated by the CBC and CTV networks.

If by "conventional wisdom" Fox News means intelligence, basic decency and honesty in reporting, then I have no doubt that the new channel will do a great job challenging these standards. I hope that my fellow Canadians are smart enough to see this new channel for what it is: a parody of journalism that would be really funny if it weren't as scary as it is.

Happy Canada Day!!!!!!!

True to my plans for this summer, I have been vegetating in happy procrastination surrounded by all the books I didn't have time to read during the academic year. As a result, I nearly missed Canada Day.

So Happy Canada Day to everybody who has the good fortune of being Canadian and to those who have not been equally blessed.

Does Canada Defend Its Citizens?

Nazia Quazi, a citizen of Canada, is being forcefully detained in Saudi Arabia by her father. The Canadian government is not doing anything to help Nazia leave Ryadh and go home. According to The Nation's brilliant Katha Pollitt

More than one person I've talked with has suggested that the fact that the Quazis are Muslim is relevant: the embassy in Riyadh doesn't want to get involved in what it apparently views as a Muslim family dispute.

A country is supposed to protect its citizens even - or especially - when they find themselves overseas. This is not the first case, however, when Canada refused to defend the rights of its citizens:

Nazia's case offers the Canadian government a chance to redeem itself after its shocking refusal this past October to help Nathalie Morin, a Canadian living in Saudi Arabia whose husband refuses to let her and her children out of the country.

This insanity is a result of Canada's notorious fear of anything having to do with "religion". I put "religion" in quotation marks because it is extremely easy to sell any kind of insanity as a valid religious experience to the Canadian government. Canadian governments are always so terrified of the word "religion" that they are willing to bend over backwards to accomodate any kook claiming to be religious. For a while, the Supreme Court of Canada actually considered the introduction of Shariah laws in Canada because apparently some people's rights to stone women are more important than the rights of the rest of the population not to witness such horrors. A Sikh boy won the right to carry a dagger at school because his right to have a scary weapon in class is more important than the right of other children to safety. Who cares about your safety if you are not "religious", anyways? Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women almost succeed in forbidding other, non-religious women to have their husbands and partners present in birth preparation classes.

And now a citizen of Canada is being detained in another country against her will but nobody cares because her abusive father is claiming that this is a religious matter. If there is truly a separation between Church and State in Canada, the "we-are-religious-so-the-government-owes-us-special-treatment" arguments should not work.

Degrassi

I love Degrassi: The Next Generation. Not only is it a great show, it also reminds me of the differences between Canada and the US, the differences that I love and celebrate.

Degrassi addresses the problems teenagers encounter in real life with a lot of common sense and with a profound understanding of today's realities. The show is supported by the government of Ontario and this tells us a lot about Canada.

Degrassi addresses the issues of teen sexuality with a lot of honesty. There is no attempt to demonize adolescent sexuality or to condemn it outright. The show doesn't have the boring preachings about the evils of having sex for young women that plague similar US teen dramas. The kids on Degrassi experiment with sex, have numerous partners, and explore their sexuality in a variety of ways. Several characters are openly gay and the show promotes the idea that this is perfectly normal and anybody who fails to accept this is wrong and unenlightened.

Unlike its American counterparts, the show doesn't condescend to its young viewers. It doesn't treat teenagers as little idiots who need to be preached to and admonished on a regular basis.

I love watching Degrassi because it shows the teenage experience the way it should be. Everybody in the show is kind, tolerant, and understanding. People make mistakes but always repent and come back to a message of kindness and acceptance of difference.

What's Happening to Canada??

God knows I love Canada. It's the place I call home, it's where my family lives, it's a beautiful country with amazing people. But recently news from Canada have been more and more and more disturbing.

In an article titled "Can a busy female politician give reliable evidence? A judge says no," Globe and Mail reports: "Lisa MacLeod's evidence in trial of Ottawa mayor was dismissed because she was commuting to Toronto, ‘leaving her husband and child in Ottawa'. MacLeod is a young female politician who commutes to her job at Queen's Park from Ottawa and leaves her husband, Joe, and four-year-old daughter, Victoria, at home. Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court said this is a big distraction for the 34-year-old woman and as a result he felt he could not accept her evidence as corroboration of the Crown's key witness in the recent high-profile, influence-peddling trial of Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien."

It's unbelievably disturbing that in Canada a woman's evidence at trial isn't given any weight because she dares to be a working mother. This is beyond disgusting. Shame on you, Justice Cunningham! You give a bad name to all Canadians.

Now I have a question: is the growing frequency of such outrageous events a result of the noxious influence of Canada's Conservative party? Does the conservative ideology trickle down from the Prime-Minister's seat to infect all strata of our society?

Let's Stop Working

Alberta Finance Minister Iris Evans proclaimed that in order to raise children properly one parent has to stay at home with them. This doesn't seem good enough for me, though. If stay-at-home parents are such a great asset for their children, why stop at one? Let's have both parents quit work and stay with their children. It will be the Finance Minister's job, of course, to create the kind of economic reality where all parents can stop working and stay at home indefinitely.

What bothers me in the varied reactions to Evans's statement, is not so much that "socially conservative groups such as the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada applauded Evans for speaking out." They are conservatives, it's their job to ensure that women are subjected and tied to the private sphere for good. What is more annoying is the reaction of progressive groups. For some reason, they decided that the only reason why people have careers is the economy: "Parents are going out to work because they need to afford the fundamentals of life - the basics of food, clothing and shelter." Apparently, the moment we can afford the fundamentals, we will have no reason to keep working. This way of putting it in reality supports the conservative agenda that pushes the image of women as working only out of desperation because there is no big strong man to support them.

Of course, Evans didn't specify the gender of the parent who should be left at home with no professional realization. But with the existing pay gap and within the patriarchal cultural tradition, we all know who those stay-at-home parents would be.

Canadian Banks

Before yet another example of popular chauvinism distracts me, I want to write about the ever-painful experience of dealing with a Canadian bank (National bank of Canada, in this case).

An ATM swallowed my debit card, which forced me to get a new one. As a result, my online banking ws blocked and I came to my local branch to reestablish online banking. The following dialogue ensued:

Me: I would like to reestablish online banking, please.

Teller: No.

Me: Yes, please.

Teller: Why do you need online banking?

Me: I use it to pay bills online.

Teller (looking at me like I told her that I use it to travel to the Moon): Pay bills? Which bills?

Me: My bills.

Teller (with profound condescension): You don't need online banking for that. You can pay them through the ATM.

Me: I live in the US for the most part, so I really need online banking. I have been using it for the past 8 years and I would like to keep using it.

Teller: Why do you live in the US?

Me: For work. Could I get online banking please?

Teller: It's blocked.

Me: I know, I would like to have it unblocked.

Teller (acting like she heard this request from me for the first time): Why?

This went on for a while longer. Another teller became involved and put me through the same round of interrogation. In the process, tellers 1 and 2 kept exchanging mocking glances and rolling their eyes in my direction. The discussion continued until I remembered my agressive Soviet roots annd demanded access to MY money which is in MY account.

I have to add that my account with this bank is not and never was in default. I never owed them a dime. I've been a loyal customer for a long time and there is always at least some money in my account. In the US, the bank tellers fall over themselves to greet me and be as helpful as possible. But then again, there is no banking monopoly in the US and people can switch their bank as often as they want.