Steckle's Trojan hobby-horse

Uber-git Liberal Paul Steckle has introduced Private Members Bill C-338 to recriminalize abortions performed after 20 weeks.
And not a moment too soon.
Because all over Canada women in their 5th month of pregnancy are looking down at their swollen bellies and saying oh man I just have to get rid of this right now or I'll look like shit in my bikini this summer. Some of them of course wanted an abortion back in spring when their tank tops started riding up a bit, but then they thought - nah, what's the rush? - I'll just wait a couple more months and get one later.

Bill C-338 makes very clear that it's high time this frivolous fashion of aborting five month old fetuses came to an end. All .4% of them. Unless it's :

"(a) to save the life of a woman whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself; or
(b) to prevent severe pathological physical morbidity of the woman."

(Editor : "severe pathological physical morbidity"? Who the fuck is writing this shit? Oh...the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus. Never mind, carry on.)

Yes, the wording is a little odd, evidently making some high falutin legal distinction between the mother becoming (a)"dead" and becoming (b) "really really dead".

No mention at all of the health of the fetus though. Or of the fact that 18 weeks is the earliest that certain congenital tests can be performed to see if the fetus has a functioning brain of any discernible kind. Or even if it will survive the birth.
No, even if you are gestating a footstool, the most important thing is to carry that footstool to full-term or suffer the legal consequences.

Kind of gives the term 'motherfucker' a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

Galloping Beaver had a great post on this a couple of days ago. But especially read the comments below it.

Hey Alberta, who's your daddy?

This year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival is going to feature the "culture of Alberta".

"Festival director Diana Parker said the Smithsonian worked with Albertan scholars, government officials and ordinary citizens to come up with ....."

Go on, take a guess. What's it going to be?
The Calgary Stampede? The Oilers? Wheat-henge?
Nope. The "culture of Alberta" is a monster truck and the tar sands.

From Canadian Press :
"One in three Alberta jobs depends on exports to the United States and 85 per cent of those exports are petroleum and natural gas."

Leaves of three, let it be.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has replaced the traditional Ontario trillium logo with a new design.

Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips defended the change :

"The feeling was, we want to retain the trillium: Is there a way to modernize it a little bit?"

Speaking before the Bilderberg group earlier this month, McGuinty was quoted by an insider.

"He gave a stump speech on how great Ontario is and then (privately later) he said we're going to announce this week we're building new nukes," a source said.

As can be seen from the 2006 logo in this picture from the first link above:

an interim logo of poison ivy was chosen to help ease the transition between the two.

Public Service Notice

If you and six of your friends are currently sleeping in a warehouse while dreaming of one day starting up your very own karate club, and some guy comes up and offers you a membership in al-Qaeda and some camera equipment, please just say no, ok?
It will save all the rest of us a great deal of trouble.
Thank you.

A quiz and a poll

Last week Canadian Cynic introduced us to the very funny Harry Hutton of "Chase me ladies, I'm in the cavalry"

This week Harry takes exception to the quiz at Fark in which you try to determine whether a given statement was made by Hitler or Ann Coulter.

Harry :
"Another scurrilous attack on Adolf Hitler. Instead of trying to refute his arguments the left just call him a Nazi, and compare him to the fruitcake Coulter."

Harry suggests an alternative quiz here.
Brits are generally more diabolically funny than Canadians but we did pull off one bit of hilarity this week. According to Angus Reid, 33% of us would still like to see heterosexuality enshrined as the official sexuality of Canada.

Media Terror Advisory System

Same news story...
Five different flavours.

Paving the way for stuff

According to their website, NASCO is "a non-profit organization dedicated to developing the world’s first international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor to improve both the trade competitiveness and quality of life in North America."

For "quality of life" here, read "stuff".

Expanding the wealth and power of corporations at the expense of people and the environment.

A ten lane corridor almost a quarter of a mile wide with gas, oil, electricity, and water pipelines running up either side, extending all the way from Mexico to Winnipeg.
Containers from the far East to be offloaded at Mexican deep-sea ports and transported by truck to the new $3 mil Mexican Customs Office - in Kansas City!
Texas has already been given both federal funding and the go-ahead to begin their section of this toll-road, and the second "Hemispheria" summit to discuss this project was due to happen in Winnipeg earlier this month.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah... Terror, Terror, Terror! Big fences! Passports and tighter border security! Bad Canada harbours terrorists! Canadians are naive! says Harper. Beef up Canada's spy network! Get under the Ballistic Missile Defense Umbrella! says the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

"Hemispheria" was cancelled due to security concerns, over the objections of the mayor of Winnipeg and the (so far laughably small) Winnipeg arm of NASCO, after the Manitoba government evidently deemed the $8 mil cost of providing security for the expected 600 CEOs and US governors to be prohibitively expensive.

So the real issue is profit vs security then?
No. The real issue is profit and their security, how to free up the movement of capital while simultaneously controlling the movement of people.
Terror! Terror! Terror! is merely one way of getting us to agree to it.
We haven't yet, but they'll be back.

From "Ironic Times"

Link

Sinking Atlantica

The “Reaching Atlantica: Business Without Borders” conference just wrapped up last weekend. It's an Atlantic Provinces Chamber of Commerce proposal to expand economic and political links between the Maritimes and the Northeastern US, and it kind of makes sense when you look at the map, doesn't it? Atlantic Canada plus Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York state and part of northern Massachusetts.

In fact the front page of the Atlantica website states :

"After the Americans rejected Reciprocity and Confederation was born, the continent was divided into two national projects...in 1867."

If this sounds like an unusual reading of history to Canadian ears, it may be because the VP soon-to-be-President of the Atlantic Provinces Chamber of Commerce is an American and the CEO of Eastern Maine Development Corp.

And while there are many alarming references to minimum wage legislation, size of public employee workforce and “union density” as barriers to “Labour Market Flexibility” and “Public Sector Efficiency”, it is in the Atlantica Media pages that they really get down to it :

"If the vision of Atlantica could be realized, it would be a wonderful facilitator toward restoring Atlantic Canada's heritage as a thriving centre of international trade, but even better would be to integrate all of Canada and the U.S. inside one big continental economic and security zone, which would also eliminate the looming problem of American passport controls at the border which former Ambassador to the U.S. Frank McKenna estimated as potentially causing a reduction of up to 7.7 million visitors to Canada, and losses of nearly $2 billion annually - mainly from the tourism industry. The ideal solution would be a European Union-style "perimeter" that would allow Canada and the U.S. to jointly manage common external border entry points while largely dismantling internal border restrictions. Last year, an independent task force sponsored by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, of which former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley is a co-chair, recommended that Canada, the United States and Mexico become a single trading zone. This is so logical that it should be a no-brainer, but resistance from the above-mentioned "usual suspects" is of course a given."

I'm sorry, who were those usual suspects you mentioned again?
Ah yes, here it is :

"the usual suspects - unions, rabid ultranationalists like the Council of Canadians, radical feminists, and other fellow-traveling leftist flat-earthers"

Dear Atlantica :
While your proposal is generally well researched and adequately reasoned, in your list of usual suspects you refer to "fellow-travelling leftist flat-earthers" when the more usual designation of "godless tree-hugging Commies" would be more consistent with the rest of your material.
.

He's a lumberhack - it isn't ok

He hides all night and he hides all day.

He cuts down trees, he skips and jumps

Between Canfor, Cons, and Libs.

The softwood deal is not one,

It's two with lots of fibs.

The Gazetteer has three great posts in a row explaining the softwood lumber deal that isn't.