April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

Canada

Congratulations Dr. Henry Morgentaler!

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Finally! After many years of being overlooked Dr. Morgentaler will receive the Order of Canada.

Image via Wikipedia

Henry Morgentaler, C.M.
Toronto, Ontario
Member of the Order of Canada

For his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations.

My own birth mother found herself pregnant with her seventh child in the late sixties. She had six children in ten years. Even then it was difficult to raise a large family. Clothes were hand me downs, lots of cheap cereals, powdered milk, no money for vacations or treats. Christmas came from the local charity and need was always felt. She had to undergo the indignity of a counsel of doctors called to determine whether she should have the right to terminate this pregnancy. Fortunately they said yes. She had the termination and a tubal at the same time.

My best friend when I was a teen found herself pregnant at age 18. She was unsure if she wanted the termination but her very catholic mother insisted she have it. Later married and pregnant with their second child when faced with a life threatening illness from her pregnancy her very catholic doctor refused to either preform an abortion or refer her to a doctor that would help. He told her it was her responsibility as a woman to carry this pregnancy to term even if it killed her and left her son motherless. She fortunately found other help but the pregnancy was much further along by then as was her chance of dying.

There can be no justice for women if it does not include the right to determine what happens to her body and her future. To deny women access to abortion is to deny half the population rights to self determination. Men can impregnate multiple women and just move on. There is no emotion toll, no physical toll, no monetary toll. Their education, careers, pensions remain unaffected yet this is just the beginning of the litany of things women who choose to be mothers must deal with.

How wonderful that there are men like Dr. Morgantaler who not only recognize these truths but fought for, at personal cost, the right for women to be treated as adults.

“I believe that children should receive love and affection so that they may grow up to become kind and responsible persons. I also believe that the best way to achieve this is to allow women and couples to decide at what time in their life they should bring a child into the world. In a case of unwanted or accidental pregnancy a woman should have the right to choose and obtain an abortion under good medical conditions to protect her life, health and future fertility. I have dedicated the largest part of my professional life as a physician to help women obtain safe abortion in an atmosphere of compassion and empathy. I am proud of the dedicated staff who have helped me achieve this humanitarian objective.” Henry Morgentaler.

Happy Canada Day!

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I can’t think of a place in the world I would rather live. Which makes me wonder why some in our country are so hell bent on importing the mindset, laws and wars of another country.

For all I love about Canada there are some things I would change. For a start I would expect corporations to pay fair taxes. Business success should not absolve one of responsibility toward the country in which you are making your profit. Fair tax share by corporations instead of politically sanctioned corporate welfare would ensure that our social safety nets could be reconstructed and kept strong. That there would be money for infrastructure and that having had a hand in building the country corporations might feel a pride and sense of responsibility toward it. If a mother on welfare had misused the minuscule funds she receives the way GM in Ontario misused their handout she would be paraded as a Welfare Queen and her picture splashed across the Sun and National Post. I look forward to a day of CEO perp walks and a welfare system which recognizes human dignity.

…A Canadian
is someone who knows how to make love
in a canoe
Pierre Burton…

I would also crack down on the influence of religion on politics. If churches want to be a part of the political process it is high time they started paying taxes. And quasi religious lobby groups like Focus on the Family have no place lobbying government for restrictions on women’s rights, gay rights and other human rights their hate filled, vile beliefs speak against. They have their freedom of religion and have the right to pursue such hatred in their gathering places. I, for one, do not expect and cannot condone my government spewing the same narrow minded bigotry.

I find it hard to believe you could find a majority of Canadians who feel that your ability to access medical treatment should be based on your wallet size and yet that is exactly what our governments have been inching towards. When Harris, Harper and their Frasier Institute buddies argue against social funded health care they are in effect looking at people who are suffering and dying and shrugging their shoulders. That is not the picture of Canadian caring that I believe most of us embody.

Parliament Building in Downtown OttawaImage by Derek Farr ( DetroitDerek ) via FlickrWe have the ability to effect change, to bring back our vision of ourselves as a caring inclusive country and that power lies in voting. While other countries around the world struggle with outright vote fraud or presumed fraud we are still lucky enough to be able to have faith in our democratic process. Voting is not a chore or a hassle or imposition, it is a right, a privilege and a duty of each citizen to make their voice heard. It is also the right and privilege of opposition parties to speak for us and against the government in power should they forget they are our representatives not our masters.

I wish each of you a happy and safe Canada Day and leave you with these jokes from Harper.

~ If you want to be a government in a minority Parliament, you have to work with other people.

~ It’s the government’s obligation to look really to the third parties to get the support to govern.

~ This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of pubic opinion.

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Canada’s wordmark and March for Life

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During the 2007 “March for LIfe” protestors were seen carrying signs bearing the official Canadian wordmark in both official languages, as seen in the pictures below taken from a YouTube video.

This is of course, not something to be done without official permission, it is in fact illegal. After the 2007 March bloggers asked if this government had officially sanctioned the use of the wordmark.

The government at the time launched an investigation and sent a cease and desist letter. Knowing that most MFL’s are right wingers and knowing that the majority of right wingers are hardcore the law is the law types one would immediately assume that action would be taken this year to ensure no banners carried the symbol.

huh…well you know what they say about assumptions. When asked about this continued flouting of the law

CLC national organizer Mary Ellen Douglas called the whole thing
“ridiculous,” and insisted that she never even saw the sign — she was too busy with the “eight thousand people” on the Hill for the march. She repeatedly excoriated the media, in general, and ITQ, specifically, for ignoring the “real story”, and instead focusing on a “tiny little sign” (that, we should point out, was
on a banner that required nearly a dozen ralliers to carry); she blamed the oversight on the “sign printers”, who, she said, were “asked to remove it,” but “accidentally left it on.” It won’t be there next year,
she said.

As for violating TBS policy, she says that, as far as she knows, the department hasn’t complained about the use of the logo at this year’s march.

It won’t be there next year, sounds familiar, almost as if it was just last year….

Hughes … says that CLC is more than happy to remove the wordmark from the banners, and will do so immediately.

Shouldn’t people who want to pass laws on others people’s reproductive organs at least pretend to give a damn about the laws we already have?

Tim Horton’s Manager Fires Single Mom Over Timbit Giveaway

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A single mother of four was fired yesterday for giving a single timbit to the crying child of a regular customer. The day after the incident when the manager had reviewed security tapes( in itself a strange thing) Ms. Lilliman was met by 3 managers and told she was being fired for theft. THEFT!!

Ms Lillman has been hired on by another Tim Horton’s as she didn’t feel comfortable returning to that store. No wonder. As if it isn’t hard enough to have a minimum wage job dealing with the public all day.

Tim Horton’s to their credit has said this was an inappropriate reaction and is currently writing definitive policy about timbit give-a-aways. They might want to consider firing the manager while they are at.

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Dog Days (UPDATE)

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(UPDATE) The court has ruled;

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that police cannot use scent-tracking canines for random searches in public places, including schools, parks, malls and bus terminals.

The decisions would put an end to the commonplace practice of random sweeps with sniffer dogs, especially to detect illegal drugs.

“No doubt, ordinary businessmen and businesswomen, riding along on public transit, or going up and down on elevators in office towers, will be outraged at any suggestion that the content of their briefcases could be randomly inspected by the police without any ‘reasonable suspicion’ of illegality,” the court said in a 6-3 written judgement.

Well done!!

Image via WikipediaTwo dog stories in the news today, both dealing with injustice.

First the Supreme Court of Canada will rule today on “whether the use of a drug-sniffing police dog during a random search of a southwestern Ontario school constitutes a reasonable search”.{CBC News}

This stems from an incident in Ontario where acting on an invitation from the school, officers and school officials confined students to their classrooms and placed all backpacks in the school gym to be sniffed out by police dogs.

With any luck they will rule against this practise. As a believer in social justice and as a mother it both sickens and saddens me that my children ( and all children ) are seen to have no right to privacy or from unreasonable search and seizure the moment they enter school property. Years of emphasis on policing rather than education, has not shown to have increased the likehood of a good school experience or education in schools in America. It is unlikely to have any better an outcome here.

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The second dog story involves bureaucrats deciding life and death on the basis of income. {CTV News}

Four dogs got out of the house on the day in question – a Sunday. Even now, Nash testified, she has no idea how it happened. A farmer just outside town called her to say the dogs were on the loose. Tarr eventually came home, the others did not.

They turned up trying to get into the kitchen of a local restaurant. Animal control officer Leanne Shirkey happened to be at the restaurant that morning. Shirkey testified the dogs were a little dirty but very friendly. She loaded them into her truck and took the dogs to the pound, which was at the town garage.

Shirkey testified that town administrator Gail Blaney and others appeared to know the dogs belonged to Nash, but they didn’t want Shirkey to contact her.

“They said, she’s poor, she doesn’t deserve these dogs,” Shirkey recalled. “It was implied that she didn’t have a job and that her financial situation was not sufficient to care for these dogs.”

Shirkey said she offered to notify Nash, but was told that wasn’t her job. She asked if she should try to find alternate homes for the dogs, but was told that an appointment had been made to have them put down on Thursday.

This case has yet to be proven, however, if officials put these animals down either because they didn’t like the woman in question or because of her financial status it should give us all a chill.

What can they take from us next?
Of course this thought process has precedent;

Rainer Knopff, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, said the program was “a biased boondoggle that had gone well past its `best before’ date.”

The program only funded groups on “one side” of the political spectrum while “socially conservative groups never got any money. Not a penny, as far as I know,” said Knopff.
He also echoed then-Treasury Board president John Baird’s suggestion, made in defending the decision to kill the program, that it made no sense for Ottawa to spend public money helping groups challenge its own legislation.
“I don’t want to pay for surrogate litigants,” said Knopff, arguing public interest groups should raise their own money for Charter cases. “If they can’t raise the money – tough.”

Corporate courts

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Guest post by Croghan27

Back story;

The bands involved, Shabot Obaadjiwan and Ardoch Algonquin First Nations had taken considerable trouble in trying to achieve a political/negotiated settlement appealing repeatedly to the Premier and ‘Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Michael Bryant for some negotiations about this incursion into their territory. They were not deemed worthy of a response by either of the honourable gentlemen.

Said their lawyer, Chris Reid:

….. Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Bryant never responded to the Ardoch Algonquin proposals.

“They instructed their lawyers to sit in court this week and say nothing while the lawyers for the mining company asked for six-month jail terms and punitive fines. The fact that Mr. Lovelace is in jail today is one hundred per cent the fault of Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Bryant.

Has nothing been leaned from the Dudley George incident at Ipperwash? (I suspect that the OPP’s reluctance to get involved in another shit storm such as ensued from that had more to do with people not getting hurt than any actions by McGuinty & Co.)

When established authorities, political and corporate, begin to use the courts and criminal system as a method to impose their will rather than those pesky and messy negotiations – it serves no one well: not (in this case) the band members, not the government leaders and certainly not the people of Canada.
[Read more…] about Corporate courts