As a compliment to Canada, repeating a gesture made in 1897 at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“Royal” only since 1904) is being given the honor of replacing the Queen’s Life Guard for twenty-four hours.
Those of us who frequent the North Woods in pursuit of Atlantic salmon are only too familiar with these insatiable and numberless horrors. They are at their worst in Labrador on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence. You can find a version there as large as your thumbnail.
Before killing himself, the deranged 25-year-old son of an Algerian immigrant shot to death 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989 as a gesture of personal revenge upon Feminism, which he blamed for ruining his life.
Canadian authorities might have deported all anti-feminist Muslims likely to produce defective offspring, but instead they blamed guns, passing Bill C-68 in 1995, which created a Canadian Firearms Registry.
Registering every firearm in Canada was marketed as a measure that would prevent crime, but in reality criminals don’t register guns and the ownership and specific identity of the weapon used in crimes is very rarely a meaningful issue.
Legislation creating the Firearm Registry was passed on the basis of estimates that promised that licensing fees would take care of nearly all its costs.
In reality, the gun registry cost $2.7 billion, 1350x the original estimate.
Why Projects Fail:
It was originally expected that the project needed only $2 million of investments while registration fees would cover the rest. In 1995, the Department of Justice reported to Parliament that the system would cost $119 million to implement, and that the income generated from licensing fees would be $117 million. This gave a net cost of $2 million.
At the time of the 2002 audit, the revised estimates from the Department of Justice revealed that the cost of the program would be more than $1 billion by 2004/05 and that the income from license fees in the same period would be $140 million. The annual operating costs of the program are reported to be $15 – $80 million.
Last Wednesday, the Canadian Parliament voted to end the Registry of long arms. $2.7 billion later, it was concluded that the Registry had never resulted in the solution of a single murder.
Karl Smith, an Assistant Professor of Public Economics and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares his confidence in the survival, and continued inevitable advance, of the welfare state, even in the face of federal deficits.
In reality, Professor Smith informs us, the only thing really causing Americans to object to wholesale redistributionism is racial animosity.
Contrary to Jonah Goldberg and others who see Canada and the United States as examples of two clashing ideologies, they are actually examples of two different ethic distributions. The United States is not Canada because there is ethnic strife between Southern Blacks and Southern Whites. That strife reduces the sense of moral obligation on the part of the white majority and so reduces government spending.
I want to be very clear that I don’t say this to paint those against social spending as racists. From where I sit I am betting that most of the intellectuals lined up against expanding the welfare state are naively unaware that their support rests upon racial strife. Otherwise they would realize that as America integrates they are doomed. They are fighting as if they believe they have a chance of winning. Given the strong secular trend in racial harmony, they do not.
I point this out also to show why the major Republican strategy for limiting government was doomed from the start and why I am also not particularly worried about Americas fiscal future per se.
I must say that Professor Smith’s perspective on the fundamental character of African-Americans seems a bit excessively pessimistic.
We have here, it seems, a vision of a nation permanently and irremediably divided between between productive, independent and self-supporting whites and needy and dependent blacks, in which the only thing that is going to change is white resentment of exploitation gradually being reduced by social integration and racial harmony. In other words, as we attend school with, mix socially with, and come to know better our helpless, ineffectual darkie neighbors, we will like them better, recognize our moral obligation to support them, and quit complaining about our tax burdens and the federal budget.
Obviously, there does exist a pathological and dependent black subculture, but it is not unique. There are significant sized white and Hispanic welfare-dependent subcultures as well. Dependency is a product of culture, of a cultural aversion to effort and education and of a cultural acceptance of unmarried promiscuity and unwed childbirth, not specifically of ethnicity or race at all. Those cultural pathologies are difficult to change, and they are cultivated rather than opposed by the condescending paternalism of Professor Smith and his ilk.
According to Smith, it is completely impossible to restrain federal spending in the face of the intransigent, irrefutable moral obligation of socialism.
Much of the handwringing about fiscal irresponsibility is a sense of alarm not only on the right, but throughout much of the political center, that these spending cuts are not actually materializing.
But, by what theory of government did you ever believe they would? Governments don’t look at how much money they have and then decide what they want to buy. They decide what they want to buy and then they look for ways to find the revenue.
Divorcing the two – through sustained deficits – was only going to lead to ever increasing levels of debt. This is what we got. At no point was the beast ever starved. The peace dividend lowered government spending growth somewhat, but that was undone by the war on terror. Otherwise spending hummed along, as it always will, with the government buying things the public thinks it ought to buy.
Yet, if this is causing upset stomachs among many of my fellow bloggers it calms mine. Its quite clear how this will end. Racial strife will continue to abate. The public will coalesce around the welfare state and taxes will be raised to meet the cost.
The fundamental do not predict rising debt forevermore. The fundamentals predict a VAT.
This is not to say I am unconcerned about our economic future. Health care costs will continue to eat up more and more of our economy unless something is done. However, trying to convince people that health care is not a social obligation a fool’s errand. The best you could do is convince them we have no obligation to the other. As the other integrates this will likewise prove impossible.
No, people will ultimately believe that health care for all is a social obligation and therefore government will pay for it. There is no more analysis to be done on that part of the question.
And, there you have it. There are people who require other people’s money to meet their personal exigencies. There are the people like Professor Smith who understand that altruistic redistribution of other people’s means on the basis of one’s moral intuitions is obligatory, and that is the whole story.
There is democracy, a hungry mob, and an indulgent and sentimental bien pensant elite, and the rest of us are in the position of the sheep participating in the democratic process with a couple of wolves to decide on what’s for dinner.
Fortunately, I think Professor Smith is as bad a prophet as he is a sociologist and an ethicist. The compelling power of liberal moral intuitions is, I would predict, going to be proven to wane very significantly as the general public inevitably comes to recognize that current (pre-Obamacare) entitlements are unsustainable, and faces a choice between maintaining entitlements and economic prosperity and growth.
You do not have to be Tocqueville to recognize that the fundamental American character has always featured a powerful determination to get ahead, to build a better future on the basis of current effort and sacrifice. It is not sectional ethnic animosity that stands in the way of implementing socialism in the United States, it is the fundamental American character and the values and attitudes that the country was built upon.
We are not Canada, not because we have blacks, but because we are the rebels who threw off the yoke of monarchy in favor of Liberty and individualism, and Canada was, practically speaking, founded by the Tories who preferred being subjects and dependents. We will never be Canada.
What I would consider a busybody Toronto neighbor saw an executive standing by a window holding what appeared to be a pistol, and phoned the local police who responded with a Swat team raid. The frightening weapon proved to be 277 lego blocks assembled into roughly the outline of a Glock 17.
(Jeremy Bell a) partner at digital marketing company Teehan+Lax was surrounded by heavily armed tactical officers, cuffed and held against the wall of his Richmond St. W. office — until, that is, the cops found the gun he had been holding in front of the window about 90 minutes earlier was a pile of blocks.
The BrickGun Semi-Automatic gun (purchased online from BrickGun, “designers and builders of the world’s most realistic custom Lego weapon models”) arrived at Bell’s office Wednesday.
The lifetime Lego fan finished assembling his toy — complete with build-it-yourself magazine — at 5:40 p.m.
It was in one piece for about 10 minutes before it fell apart, he recalled yesterday.
But the tenant in an apartment about six metres across the way didn’t see that last part. And so the tenant called the cops.
At about 7 p.m., as Bell and some colleagues played a video game, the Emergency Task Force moved in.
“They were screaming in the hallway for me to come out,” Bell said. “When I went out there and I saw there was an officer kind of crouched down in the stairwell, it was clear what was going on.”
Despite the very real guns pointed at him, Bell said he didn’t fret.
“I’m not trafficking guns or selling drugs or anything like that, so as soon as I saw that these cops were legit, I was like, all right, this has got to be about this stupid gun.”
Pressed up against the wall, his hands thrown in cuffs, Bell directed the cops to the pieces of fake gun sitting in a box by the window. Moments later, he was free.
“At least you have a story to tell now,” he quoted one cop as saying.
I think this case is a classic example illustrating the exaggerated fear of weapons characteristic of today’s deracinated urban masses. Put a badge on someone and sprinkle the authority of the state upon his head and he suddenly magically is supposed to acquire powers of judgment and responsibility beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. It seems to me that Jeremy Bell came fairly close to proving, along with Amadou Diallo, just how foolish that theory is.
Mark Steyn finds that the triumph of American genetic Imperialism is just one more humiliating consequence of Canada’s nationalized health system.
My jaw doesn’t often drop, but this story had it heading for the basement:
Thousands of Canadians who are infertile in Canada have to place all their hopes on just 33 men who are Canadian sperm donors.
What? A nation of 30 million people has just 33 sperm donors? Apparently so. Now why would that be?
At one time Canada had two dozen sperm banks but when the Assisted Human Reproduction Act made it illegal to pay for sperm or egg donors they dried up in 2004.
Today there are very few men willing to give up their sperm for nothing.
…
“Today, there is one South Asian donor for all of Canada,” he says, noting that couples are often shocked at the limited choices.
One donor for thousands of wannabe parents? He must be working round the clock. Well, not quite. For Canadian womenfolk have now been reduced to the ultimate indignity:
Doctors and patients have had little choice but to use sperm and eggs from south of the border.
One of the biggest suppliers of donor sperm is Outreach Health Services which imports and distributes semen for assisted reproduction clinics across Canada. The company imports sperm from an agency that collects primarily from men in Georgia and northern Florida, where donors are paid about $100 per visit.
With so much sperm coming from the States, some estimate that up to 80 per cent of babies conceived in Canada through donor sperm have American DNA.
Wow. This isn’t your father’s War of 1812. The poor Canucks never saw it coming. Millions of Yank sperm leaping like salmon up the Ontario side of Niagara Falls.
A wait for semen seems pretty much the logical reductio of “free at the point of demand” health care. But, as Kathy Shaidle says, how can this go wrong? Canada, circa 2050: Eighty percent drawling rednecks demanding grits with their maple-creme donuts, and the remainder a vast tribe of intermarried step-siblings riddled with genetic disorders descended from “one South Asian donor.”
The Shiawasee County, Michigan Argus-Press reports that being the victim of international disapprobation has brought a Michigan welfare mom 15 minutes of fame.
An Owosso (Michigan) woman says she was recently denied permission to cross the Canadian border because she is on welfare.
Rose Kelley, 25, said she was trying to visit friends and family who live in Canada, but ran into many complications on the way.
She arrived at the Sarnia, Ontario, border May 1 with her children Xander, 5, and Onyx, 1. When she reached the customs and immigration office she was given a list of items she needed to cross the border – some of which included: evidence of citizenship, financial support, financial assistance, confirmed means of departure, and more. …
Because of this, she had to travel back to Owosso to get the necessary papers and then return May 3.
“I brought everything. My entire folder had every piece of paperwork that they could ask for,†Kelley said
However, she was once again denied entry.
“They said I don’t make enough money and people on welfare shouldn’t take a vacation,†said Kelley, a single mother who has been on assistance for five years. “I was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to cross the border until my life ‘drastically changed.’â€
She said she was stunned by the events. …
Because of the incident, Kelley said she filed a discrimination complaint with the agency Tuesday, but has heard no response yet.
Dozens of outraged liberal Canadian readers expressed indignation, reported the Toronto Sun, which also quoted Ms. Kelley observing indignantly:
It has been a terrible ordeal,” Kelley, 25, of Owosso, Mich., said of last Sunday’s trip to the Sarnia border crossing where she was turned back. “I have family and friends over there and I want to visit them.” …
“This trip has been a big ordeal for me and my children,” Kelley said yesterday. “I have never done anything wrong and have a squeaky clean criminal record.”
Amusingly, both American and Canadian press accounts strike poses of open-mouthed astonishment at the man-bites-dog bizarreness of those Canadian Border Service Agents actually looking upon being on welfare as a discreditable status.
Nadeem Esmail, in the Wall Street Journal, suggests Americans thinking about socialized health care ought to look at the Canadian health system to see what it’s going to be like.
Health-care resources are not unlimited in any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.
Canadians often wait months or even years for necessary care. For some, the status quo has become so dire that they have turned to the courts for recourse. Several cases currently before provincial courts provide studies in what Americans could expect from government-run health insurance.
In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.
Ontario’s government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life. He’s challenging Ontario’s government-run monopoly health-insurance system, claiming it violates the right to life and security of the person guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Shona Holmes, another Ontario court challenger, endured a similarly harrowing struggle. In March of 2005, Ms. Holmes began losing her vision and experienced headaches, anxiety attacks, extreme fatigue and weight gain. Despite an MRI scan showing a brain tumor, Ms. Holmes was told she would have to wait months to see a specialist. In June, her vision deteriorating rapidly, Ms. Holmes went to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, where she found that immediate surgery was required to prevent permanent vision loss and potentially death. Again, the government system in Ontario required more appointments and more tests along with more wait times. Ms. Holmes returned to the Mayo Clinic and paid for her surgery.
On the other side of the country in Alberta, Bill Murray waited in pain for more than a year to see a specialist for his arthritic hip. The specialist recommended a “Birmingham” hip resurfacing surgery (a state-of-the-art procedure that gives better results than basic hip replacement) as the best medical option. But government bureaucrats determined that Mr. Murray, who was 57, was “too old” to enjoy the benefits of this procedure and said no. In the end, he was also denied the opportunity to pay for the procedure himself in Alberta. He’s heading to court claiming a violation of Charter rights as well.
These constitutional challenges, along with one launched in British Columbia last month, share a common goal: to win Canadians the freedom to spend their own money to protect themselves from the inadequacies of the government health-insurance system.
550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium, capable of being enriched for use in nuclear power plants or bombs, arrived in Montreal on Saturday following a secret airlift and sea voyage. The uranium came from Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, and was sold to Canada’s Cameco Corporation by the government of Iraq in a deal worth tens of millions of dollars. US and Iraqi security forces took considerable care to prevent the material falling into the hands of jihadist forces or insurgent factions.
CBC’s Rex Murphy identifies Canada’s two billion dollar Gun Registry as a classic example of “feel good legislation” representing a pretense at solving a problem, but completely ineffective. From watching this one, I get the impression that Canada has a lot better news commentary than we do.
Ezra Levant, publisher of Calgary’s Western Standard, two years ago reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons.
Yesterday, as the National Post reports, he was hailed before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission to answer a complaint filed by the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada.
Levant has produced several video statements defending Candanian free speech, which are linked by LGF.
