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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 10:23 pm Post subject: |
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No I haven't read it, but what you've written here doesn't surprise me. Government regulation is not the problem in Canada...or if it is, it's only a minor factor. The problem is a re-emergence of the "family compact"; a small oligarchy of close-minded individuals are the senior managers at all the big Canadian companies, who rant and rave about federal regulations, but don't have the moxie or the skills to go out and either compete in the global market or develop new companies and products.
Remember, all these guys like the Vancouver Port Authority dipshit are all the members of the boards and members of the local chamber of commerce...not the average worker on the street or the average bureaucrat.
A perfect example of this were the reforms to Canada Post that started about 15 years ago...the post office got taken over by a bunch of MBAs who are all well and good about "serving the business community" and bending over backwards to help companies stuff flyers down our mailboxes, but who are too lazy to go out and start companies of their own.
Canada needs to have its "chaebols" busted up and infused with new blood the way the Japanese combines were broken up at the end of World War II. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 5:31 am Post subject: |
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| It is very easy to dig up the country and sell it to the USA. But Canada would strongly benefit from being more than a supplier to an engine of growth and becoming an engine of growth herself. RIM demonstrates that innovation can happen in Canada. |
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beast
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:06 am Post subject: |
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| I guess one could argue that a country with a pathetic military and huge natural resources will prosper. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 9:41 am Post subject: |
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| beast wrote: |
| I guess one could argue that a country with a pathetic military and huge natural resources will prosper. |
Canada doesn't need a powerful standing military. It mooches off the US for peacetime defense. But if necessary, I have no doubt Canada will institute a draft and carry its water as it did in WWII. |
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Julius
Joined: 27 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 2:41 am Post subject: |
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| Is Canada a Banana Republic? |
Canada has 3 syllables, all of them "a" vowel sounds.
So does banana. |
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Pluto
Joined: 19 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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Have you seen this one, Mises?
The Internet Saved my Tongue Ezra Levant in Reason Magazine.
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Early on the morning of February 13, 2006, nearly 40,000 copies of the Western Standard rolled off the presses in Edmonton, Alberta. Tucked inside that week�s issue of Canada�s only national conservative magazine, on pages 15 and 16, was a story about the international controversy over a Danish newspaper that had printed a dozen satirical cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammad. Our article, which was illustrated by eight of the cartoons, would soon trigger a three year government investigation of whether I, as the Western Standard�s publisher, had violated the rights of Canadian Muslims by �discriminating� against their religion.
The investigation vividly illustrated how Canada�s provincial and national human rights commissions (HRCs), created in the 1970s to police discrimination in employment, housing, and the provision of goods and services, have been hijacked as weapons against speech that offends members of minority groups. My eventual victory over this censorious assault suggests that Western governments will find it increasingly difficult in the age of the Internet to continue undermining human rights in the name of defending them.
By commissioning the Muhammad cartoons, the Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, was making a point about the West�s fear of insulting Islam. A Danish author and longtime leftist activist named K�re Bluitgen had written a children�s book about Muhammad, but because some Muslims consider visual depictions of their prophet taboo, Bluitgen found it difficult to find an illustrator. Jyllands-Posten editors wanted to highlight this Danish culture of self-censorship and show the newspaper�s support for freedom of speech by publishing their own cartoons of Muhammad.
A few of the images were critical of radical Islam, but the criticism wasn�t any harsher than that routinely heaped on other religions and ideologies in the editorial cartoons of Western newspapers. One showed Muhammad in heaven, saying, �Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!� as suicide bombers floated up to the clouds. Another depicted Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb.
The cartoons were published in September 2005, but they didn�t make international news until the next year, when a group of Danish imams went on a world tour to drum up Muslim anger against Denmark. The imams brought three additional cartoons along with the original dozen. Those three additions, which hadn�t been published in Denmark or anywhere else, were grotesque, including one showing Muhammad having sex with a dog. They were the imams� own handiwork, added to the bundle in case the Jyllands-Posten efforts didn�t achieve the desired response. Up until that moment, the phrase cartoon violence had summoned to mind images no more harmful than Wile E. Coyote fighting the Road Runner. But after the imam tour in the spring of 2006, more than 100 people died in purportedly spontaneous riots against the cartoons. Half a dozen terrorist plots to avenge the artwork were uncovered across Europe. Demagogic governments from Tehran to Damascus seized the opportunity to deflect attention away from their own problems.
Every newspaper and TV station in the Western world covered the story of the riots, but almost none of them showed the original cartoons themselves. The media�s self-censorship was based on the same fear exhibited by Denmark�s illustrators. As a journalist, I was appalled by this cowardice masquerading as sensitivity. Western Standard editor Kevin Libin and I knew our readers would be interested in this story and would want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about. |
One wonders if Denmark is a Banana Republic, too?
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I must have done 100 interviews that week. The first would be particularly memorable. At 7 a.m. on Monday, February 13, while our magazine was being trucked from our printers to the post office, I appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation�s Eye Opener radio show in Calgary. The amiable Jim Brown was the host, and the other guest was Syed Soharwardy. All I knew about Soharwardy at the time was that he was a Pakistani immigrant to Canada who worked for IBM and had a part-time gig as a preacher at a tiny mosque in a northeast Calgary strip mall. Soharwardy had very few followers�about 40 congregants in a city that was home to thousands of Muslims. But he was a big-time media hound, always trolling for interviews while the city�s more prominent imams rolled their eyes.
I explained the newsworthiness of the cartoons. But Soharwardy wasn�t quite in sync with our Canadian concepts of freedom of the press and the separation of religion and state. He called me a �terrorist� for publishing the cartoons�a bit rich, coming from someone who, I later learned, does the radical Muslim lecture circuit in Saudi Arabia. Then he announced to startled CBC listeners that he was a direct descendant of Muhammad and therefore felt personally offended. I wasn�t quite sure what to do with that one, so I kept on message, saying Soharwardy was free to follow the Koran as his law, but we were in Canada, not Saudi Arabia. People like me could publish whatever they liked. The debate degenerated into a shouting match.
...
So Soharwardy visited the Calgary Police Service, where he demanded that I be arrested. The police politely explained to him that he wasn�t in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan anymore and that police in Canada don�t enforce the Koran or get involved in political disputes. Next he filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission (AHRCC). This body was more receptive to the idea that I should be punished for giving offense.
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Soharwardy followed up his original complaint with a detailed list of legal arguments�but not from any Canadian law books. He cited passages from the Koran as his precedent, insisting that �the respect and obedience to Prophet Muhammad is the most basic requirement of Faith.� At the end of his letter, he offered both artistic and religious criticism of all eight of our Muhammad images, adding, �I am quite disturbed and mentally tortured by these cartoons.� And his demands were clear: �I am expecting a formal apology�from the Western Standard. Please help.� |
I don't know who this Soharwardy guy is, but he seems like a real piece of work. Does he, or many others (AHRCC et al.) in Canada, often confuse islamic jurisprudence with English Common Law?
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Soharwardy didn�t participate. He preferred a Shariah-style solution. Six weeks after we published the cartoons, when members of the public had already chewed the issues over and made up their minds, when the commotion was dying down and we decided to let our extra security staff go, I got around to writing the Western Standard�s reply to Soharwardy�s complaint. �The complaint is a frivolous and vexatious abuse of process,� I began. �It has no basis in fact or Canadian law. It is contrary to Canadian values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press and religious plurality, under which Canadians are free from compulsion to submit to religious edicts. The complaint is an attempt to abuse the power of the state to chill discussion about subjects that are in the public interest. It is also an inappropriate combination of mosque and state, using a secular government agency to enforce a Muslim religious precept, namely the fundamentalist prohibition of the depiction of Mohammed.�
I still believe every word of that, but it�s a bit embarrassing that I actually thought those principles mattered. As I learned since, the right to not be offended trumps freedom of speech in Alberta. That�s the official position of the provincial government, as argued by its lawyer in Lund v. Boissoin, a case in which a Christian pastor was given a lifetime ban prohibiting him from criticizing gay marriage. |
So what if someone calls for the death of every homosexual throughout Alberta or Canada, say a muslim imam?
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| None of this would have happened had I not videotaped my interrogation and uploaded the results onto YouTube. I was the one who was supposed to crumple under the weight of a politically correct accuser and the AHRCC bureaucrats he coopted. Instead, McGovern quit and Soharwardy abandoned his complaint. For the first time in nearly three years, I felt as if my allies and I might win this fight� not just the narrow legal struggle about publishing a bunch of cartoons but the larger fight for our freedom. |
Long story short, Mr. Levant got subpoenaed to the HRC, brought a video camera and posted the proceedings on YouTube. The HRC and mr. soharwardy were embarrassed. Will this episode spell the end for the HRCs, or will they live to fight another day? |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 3:16 pm Post subject: |
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I've been following that ordeal very closely.
Sadly, Levant will be the first of many.
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The second policy is equally frustrating, with the Liberals voting to expand the Canadian Human Rights Commission. This seems to be a core failing of Liberal delegates, who believe liberty in society is strengthened through enforcement of government-approved messages on what constitutes acceptable behaviour. Modern �progressives� support this fashionable concept of enforceable �rights� by imposing control over speech, expression, and let�s be clear here, thought itself:
Convention delegates also approved a resolution to make the Canadian Human Rights Commission accountable to the House of Commons and expand its reach to include discrimination based on citizenship status and socio-economic class.
�We strongly encourage the Liberals to vote in favour of this resolution, which will give legislative strength to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which is in the great Liberal tradition,� said the delegate introducing the motion.
There was considerable debate over the implications the resolution might have.
�There is an aspect of this resolution that absolutely terrifies me,� said an Ontario delegate.
�We have had over the last few months a demonstration of an abuse of power by the human rights commission. This resolution would actually add to the probability that the human rights commission would continue to abuse its power,� he said.
It isn�t a probability. It�s a mathematical certainty. Just as it has already abused it�s extra-judicial authority. The terrifying thing, as the delegate notes, is that the CHRC appears to have control that extends beyond the power of ordinary court authority, able to rule on rights that �supersede� secular law. This notion that human rights exist outside of the rule of law as enshrined in the Constitution is a dangerous alternative based upon modern liberal revisionism and restorative justice.
The worst part of the CHRC is that prosecutions are based upon the sole discretion of these extra-legal authorities, from individuals who openly bear a torch for restorative justice, or the concept that there is a kind of class system in Canada of perpetrators and victims. It gives rise to the belief there is an endemic and systematic form of racism and prejudice in this country that attempts to abuse minorities of their �human rights�, whether it be a man who thinks he is a woman being barred from a �woman�s only� gym, to a magazine publicist being dragged before a court for reproducing political cartoons of a religion that can�t take a joke very well.
If the Liberals decide to fight the next election on the expansion of the CHRC, using this nonsensical notion that it �is in the great Liberal tradition�, I hope there will be a party able to stand up to them. One should hope it would be the Conservative Party. |
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/05/04/raphael-alexander-liberals-support-expansion-of-chrc-powers.aspx |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 8:20 am Post subject: |
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http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2010/05/09/calgary-bmo-mortgage-fraud.html
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BMO's mortgage fraud claims won't be probed
RCMP and the Calgary police have told the Bank of Montreal they won't investigate what could be the biggest mortgage fraud in Canadian history, CBC News has learned.
Both police forces stated last week they were reviewing the voluminous case � more than 35,000 documents � assembled by the bank's investigators to see if a criminal investigation was warranted.
But sources have told the CBC that top investigators from both forces recently met with the bank and told it they were not interested in pursuing a criminal investigation.
In an email Sunday, the bank's Calgary lawyer, Munaf Mohamed, declined comment.
The lack of police response does not surprise former RCMP officer Chris Mathers, who said police forces simply can't tackle alleged frauds of this magnitude.
"There just aren't enough police officers to investigate these crimes," said Mathers, a Toronto-based corporate crime consultant. Mathers said fraud is rampant in Canada and police forces are already swamped.
"If you double the number of investigators, you will just have double the number of crimes being investigated and still have a whole bunch stacked in a pile and waiting to go."
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This is banana republic'ish. |
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rollo
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: China
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| Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 5:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Canada needs to be involved in Asia. It has almost no presence in China except for some mining experst working for the chinese government. This is crucial. Often Canada seems behind trends, industry and financial sectors dont seem nimble or able to adjust. Rim buys patents and is not an innovator. Interesting about Canada not stepping onto the world stage trade wise. |
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.38 Special
Joined: 08 Jul 2009
Location: Pennsylvania
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| Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| I'd still rather be in Canada's shoes. |
I'd rather be in Canada's pants 
"Is that a banana in you federation or are you just happy to see me?"
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goniff
Joined: 31 Dec 2007
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| Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 4:50 am Post subject: |
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| yes...we have no bananas!! |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Thu May 13, 2010 6:05 am Post subject: |
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http://www.vancouversun.com/business/British+Columbians+fuel+spending+with+credit/3016442/story.html
British Columbians fuel spending with credit
The Certified General Accountants Association of Canada, in its analysis of household debt, found that even during the recession 47-per-cent of British Columbians surveyed reported taking on more debt compared with the national average of 38
While Canadians were racking up the highest household debt levels among developed nations, British Columbians appeared more willing than most to keep spending on credit, according to a per cent.
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Across Canada, however, the CGA association was able to observe that by 2009, consumer debt in Canada had more than doubled since 1989 to $1.44 trillion -$41,740 for every single Canadian. By the end of 2009,
Canadians' debt-to-income ratio reached 144 per cent. And household debt, expressed as a ratio compared with household assets, ranked as highest among 20 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
"Canadian households' use of financing is one of the few things that did not noticeably adjust to a changing economic reality, " Rock Lefebvre, vice-president of research and standards, said in releasing the report.
"The growth in household debt has been strong during good times and showed remarkable resilience during challenging times."
...
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/British+Columbians+fuel+spending+with+credit/3016442/story.html#ixzz0nom3cc8x
It goes on to describe how low interest rates incentivized people to take debt. Keep that in mind as Canada begins to melt down this year and the idiot talking heads start pontificating about the causes.
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/05/household_debt.html?utm
^ Expressed in charts. |
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goreality
Joined: 09 Jul 2009
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| Posted: Thu May 13, 2010 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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| The sky is falling! The Sky is falling! |
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chellovek
Joined: 29 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 11:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Julius wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Is Canada a Banana Republic? |
Canada has 3 syllables, all of them "a" vowel sounds.
So does banana. |
Bananada it should be renamed. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 6:23 pm Post subject: |
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Accused Ponzi schemer won't be prosecuted
Nicholas Stein, CBC News
The Ontario Crown Attorney's Office withdrew criminal charges against a Toronto man accused of operating a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme partly because the court lacks resources, CBC News has learned.
According to a report filed by a court-appointed receiver, Tzvi Erez, 43, used a series of expertly forged documents to defraud more than 70 investors of $27 million.
But in an email from Crown attorney Christine McGoey obtained by CBC News, the Crown said one of the reasons it decided not to pursue the case was because of the competition over trial time.
"There are very serious criminal matters competing for limited trial time, with cases being stayed because of delay," wrote McGoey. "And we have to consider the impact of any delay that might occur throughout the process and the variety of factors that are taken into account in assessing which cases will go to trial before others."
In June 2009, Erez was charged by Toronto police with one count of fraud over $5,000, seven counts of forgery and one count of violating his probation on a prior fraud conviction. The charges were based on evidence provided by one of Erez's alleged victims, Willy Tencer.
According to a Sept. 30 memo written by Tencer's lawyer, Lou Brzezinski, assistant Crown attorney Donna Gillespie told him the charges were dropped "because the courts were tied up with more serious criminal matters [such as rape and murder]."
Brzezinski, whose client invested more than $1.2 million with Erez, claimed Gillespie said that "court time and availability of judges were insufficient � and as a result, hard choices had to be made."
Gillespie did not respond to requests for an interview. Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley also declined to be interviewed. |
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/11/15/tzvi-erez.html?ref=rss#ixzz15PMx6K6j
Has the RCMP and CSIS no financial crimes division? I guess I know where I should set up my fund. |
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