If there is anyone left in Canada who still believes that our judges are fair and impartial on the homosexual issue, they should know about an event that took place during Gay Pride Week in Toronto.
On June 26, 2003, The Ontario Law Society sponsored a panel consisting of the lawyers who had successfully argued for same-sex marriages in the Ontario courts. Attending this panel and the reception afterwards were invited guests including the judges who decided in favour of same-sex marriage and representatives of homosexual advocacy groups, plus organizations offering services for homosexuals/lesbians as well as representatives from all three levels of government.
There is a list of judges involved in same-sex marriage who were there and important quotations. Read the next bit to find out how true the ending quotation really is!
The most bizarre comment of all during that celebration was made by Toronto lawyer, Martha McCarthy, who had argued the homosexuals' case in the Ontario courts. During her speech on the panel she stated:
We have to be so thankful for the wonderful judges … who acted with impartiality when faced with an issue that Parliament dumped upon them. (Emphasis ours)
"Impartiality?" It is most definitely not the word to describe what has occurred.
Another female lawyer in the Ontario case was lesbian Cynthia Peterson, who perhaps inadvertently, revealed the Liberal Government's strategy in making the Reference (see article "Real Women of Canada Seeks Leave to Appeal to Supreme Court on Same-sex Marriage", p….., for definition of "Reference") to the Supreme Court of Canada on the three narrow questions. She stated:
The reference [to the Supreme Court of Canada] in my view is a political necessity, not a legal one. The government decided not to appeal the decisions, which I commend them for, but we know even within the governing party, there isn't unanimous support for that decision. So there is a lot of political pressure on the government .... that political pressure is evident in that they announced that there will be a free vote, which I think is reprehensible, but it is very common on gay and lesbian issues for the government to call a free vote, sadly. The reference is to get the approval of the Supreme Court of Canada, so that when it goes to the House for a free vote ... they can say that the Supreme Court has said that religious freedoms will be protected. There is a real political value in that ... the other political value is in the Alberta situation ... we know the government there is doing everything possible to prevent same-sex marriages. But if we can get assistance from the Supreme Court of Canada in the reference to either pre-empt the battle altogether or use it to ensure uniformity across the country, then I think there will be real value there as well ... I'm pretty confident that this is more a political necessity than a legal one and that it will not in any way undo any of the legal victories that we've won. (Emphasis ours.)
In other words, it is obvious that the Liberal government's legislation on same-sex marriage is going by way of Reference to the Supreme Court of Canada to merely have it rubber stamped and endorsed by the Court for political not legal reasons. The Reference and debate on the bill in the House of Commons is just a matter of form to give the impression of democratic process in order to disguise the arrogant high-handed deed it is. The whole matter is a Parliamentary charade, and a grievous offence to democracy.
It appears that the judges in Canada have made a charade of justice. Who can trust judges any longer? Theirs is a political game playing out in Canada - not a legal one.
Did you ever believe otherwise? I did not. This is Canada.
Consider, for instance, a remarkable event during gay pride week in Toronto. On June 26 there was a private Law Society reception at which gay lawyers and clients purportedly whooped it up with the very same judges who had just ruled in favour of gay marriage. Amid toasting and applause, the judges were photographed embracing grinning gay activists.
I just added an update to another post below, but I'll place its heading here so no-one will miss it. Robert Fulford sees through the fog put out by our government and the media and particularly CBC. Only the National Post has been exposing some of it and hiring writers of the calibre of Fulford.
Update 3:50 pm: Check This Out, entitled Fulford on Arafat. It is an excerpt from this article:
Yasir Arafat and the politics of denial by Robert Fulford, The National Post, Sept. 13, 03
It Helps to Travel in the Right Circles: Paul Martin
Maurice Strong, one member of the entourage of our Governor General Adrienne Clarkson for her circum-polar trip compliments of the Canadian taxpayers, helped Paul Martin get his start with Canadian Steamships Line. Read about it and some details of his wealth--about which Martin, himself, has not been forthcoming--at the following links:
The Mapleleaf website, which has been keeping track of Martin's international shipping empire of 37 bulk cargo vessels, claims CSL controls assets of almost $700 million and in March 2001 had annual revenues of $280 million.
Asked how a man who owns a sprawling farm in Iron Hill, Que., a home in Montreal and a condo in Ottawa connects with people who have a hard time paying the rent, Martin became testy.
"Let me tell you. You know, my father didn't have any money. The fact is my father's family, my mother's family -- they don't come from money. My mother's family were farming people."
"To put it another way, if I didn't understand that what life is all about was, in fact, exactly the people who live around the corner from here and who look at you to make life better for them -- if it wasn't for that, then I wouldn't be in public life."
Martin's holdings have been the source of controversy since 1988, even though he tried to protect himself from this through public disclosure. The scrutiny intensified when Martin became finance minister in 1993 and placed his holdings in a blind trust.
There were questions about CSL ships being flagged in offshore tax havens and the use of low-paid foreign workers. And there have been questions about how blind his blind trust really was. Allegations of conflict of interest have been dismissed by the government's ethics counsellor every single time.
BOSTON -- The federal government is falling far short of its post-Sept. 11 goal of removing nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants from the United States over the following six years.
The $10 million approved in April for nine new federal enforcement teams has been released, but the positions have yet to be filled. No new money is proposed for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
An internal immigration agency document estimated it will take 240 new teams over the next four years to round up foreigners who have ignored orders to leave the country.
"The numbers are growing at an alarming rate -- for every 10 final orders (of deportation) issued, we're removing six people," said Anthony Tangeman, director of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and removal operations in Washington. "We don't have the capability to remove all the removable aliens. We're not going to get to where we need to go in my lifetime, or at least in my career as director of this program."
The 19 hijackers involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, traveled to the United States on valid visas; two were in the country illegally at the time of the attacks.
[. . . .]
Of the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants, about 400,000 have been identified and ordered deported. It is the job of Tangeman's bureau to find them.
[. . . .]
Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that wants to curb immigration, praised what he called a rare positive immigration effort.
"We wouldn't have nearly as many absconders, and it wouldn't be as hard flushing them out, if we didn't have such a permissive system for illegal immigrants in general," he said.
Two thick black binders rest in deportation supervisor Jim Martin's bureau office in Boston, and they are filled with hundreds of wanted posters. The crimes listed under some photos include rape, child sex abuse and drug dealing, but many fugitives are guilty only of refusing to go home.
[. . . .]
The Boston office, which controls all of New England, has arrest warrants for about 1,000 illegal immigrants -- a fraction of the 400,000 nationwide. But the office is considered a model because of the systematic way the unit targets, investigates and gets the fugitives. Nationwide, 110,000 illegal immigrants have been deported in this fiscal year, about 71,000 with criminal convictions.
Still, nothing has stopped the stream of illegal immigrants coming into the country, overstaying their visas or evading deportation orders.
Is this kind of information available in Canada? Or would it be unavailable because of the privacy rights of Canada's illegals, criminals and assorted deportables? And what is being done to stop our stream of "illegal immigrants coming into the country, overstaying their visas or evading deportation orders"? Link to the story of one of them Deported Iranian admits he lied by Stewart Bell, National Post, Sept. 13, 03.
The deportation of Mansour Ahani was, in the end, remarkably swift. On the night of June 18, 2002, immigration officers escorted the Iranian, deemed a security threat to Canada, from his jail cell in Hamilton to a chartered plane for the flight home to Tehran.
But it had taken nine years of epic legal battles to get him on that jet. Backed by refugee and human-rights lobby groups, Ahani fought his deportation in appeal after appeal, eventually before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Describing himself as a defector from the Iranian intelligence service, he argued he knew secrets the Islamic republic would not want divulged. In his refugee claim, he wrote: "I am dead if I return." His Toronto lawyer said he faced "summary execution." The rallying cry of his supporters became Deportation Equals Death Sentence. Since returning to Iran, activists assert, Ahani has disappeared.
They are wrong.
Ahani has not disappeared, nor has he been killed, nor is he imprisoned. He lives with his parents and siblings in a two-storey house in the Naziabad neighbourhood of southern Tehran, where he grew up.
My Commentary:
Note those last three sentences, that Ahani lied, and this:
***Mansour Ahani gained the support of human rights activists with his tale that he would be tortured if he was deported to Iran.***
The National Post was denied a visa by the Iranian government for a reporter to go to Iran to investigate so The National Post paid an Iranian reporter to interview Ahani.
Guess who paid for his appeals? For the chartered airplane to take him to Iran? Supported by pro-immigration "refugee and human-rights lobby groups" who believed his lies, and by taxpayer largesse, Ahani lasted through NINE YEARS OF APPEALS. Meanwhile, our schools, hospitals, and countless other services need money. It is wasted on so many of these characters. Read the whole article. It is an eye-opener.
'Magnificent 19' praised by Muslim extremists, by Sean O'Neill, Sept. 12, 03. Luckily, this group represents "only a handful" of UK Muslims and their press conference was seen as a failure. Why not jail or deport these fellows, then? They are traitors.
[S]pokesmen for Al-Muhajiroun took turns to deliver hectoring statements, fatwas and off-the-cuff declarations.
Sulayman Keeler . . . said Muslims who joined the police, Army, House of Lords, CIA or FBI had committed "gross acts of apostasy".
Sajid Sharif said the September 11 atrocities were "a good deed in the eyes of Islam" and Muslims who served with the British Army in Iraq were "legitimate targets for the mujahideen".
The BBC seems to have the Canadian attitude to other peoples' money – an attitude so well displayed by our Governor General and entourage. "We exist on OPM so let’s boogie!"
The BBC has sent 50 of its employees on an all-expenses-paid trip to attend a conference in Amsterdam in a decision which has raised fresh concerns about its use of licence-payers' money.
At least a dozen senior BBC managers who are on the trip to the Dutch capital are staying in five-star hotels in rooms that are costing the corporation £260 a night each.
Many of those on the trip, which is thought to have cost tens of thousands of poundswork for BBC Technology, the corporation's internet and new media division. It announced earlier this year that it was making 100 staff redundant because of cash shortages. ,
The same division is already subject to a review, ordered by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, after some of its commercial rivals claimed that it was receiving too much public money.
The BBC has defended its expenditure on the junket, saying that its staff are in the city for the annual International Broadcasting Convention, which began on Thursday and runs until Tuesday. The corporation adds that the trip is an ideal opportunity for staff to network with colleagues from other leading broadcasters from around the world.
Critics, however, have questioned the need to send so many staff and to put them up in such expensive hotels.
Among those participating are all 16 of BBC Technology's board members. The presence of so many senior staff meant that the division's annual board meeting, which took place on Friday, had to be held in a Dutch hotel rather than at Television Centre in London. At least 12 staff are staying in the Grand Amsterdam hotel, which offers five-star accommodation, and which is situated close to the city's Dam Square and Royal Palace.
[. . . .]
[John Whittingdale, the Conservative culture spokesman,] added: "The way the BBC is funded means that there is no incentive for the corporation to examine what is the most cost-effective way of doing things. The incentive to try and minimise costs and do the right thing by the viewer is negligible.
Eat your heart out CBC employees -- or cultivate your relationship with Adrienne. See also, Bud Weighs in Again: Fat Cats at the Trough, which contains a section on the CBC
The Canuckistanian shows why Israel should pay no attention to those who wish to keep Arafat in power, the man most responsible for The Oslo accord's terrible toll. Read the facts included. Terrible!
The Oslo Accord was a total failure, thanks to Arafat. In fact, why are the Israelis talking of removing him? There is a way to permanently end this duplicitous thug’s influence in keeping Palestinian terror alive. Israelis should use it.
Update 3:50 pm: Fulford on Arafat
Yasir Arafat and the politics of denial by Robert Fulford, The National Post, Sept. 13, 03
Read the whole article. It should be on The National Post website by tomorrow.
The treatment of this sacred monster [Arafat] demonstrates our chronic inability to see the meaning of even the most obvious contemporary events.
Our smug belief that we can buy off our enemies, our perverse desire to flatter those who say they hate us, our need to persuade ourselves that killers are really moderates in disguise, our willingness to accept any absurdity so long as it helps us avoid facing reality – all these tendencies play themselves out in our attitudes to Arafat. Above all, we refuse to believe threats we don’t want to hear, such as Arafat’s consistent threat to destroy Israel.
Astonishing images from inside the womb produced by new technology show babies apparently smiling and crying.
The breakthrough in ultra-sound techniques, known as 3D and 4D scanning, could lead to advances in baby health for a whole range of conditions, including Down's Syndrome, reports Sky News.
Captured images offering new insight into fetal behavior show babies yawning, blinking, sucking their fingers and seeming to cry and smile, the British news channel said.
Traditionally, doctors have assumed infants made facial expressions, such as smiling, only after birth by copying their mother.
I wonder if this will affect abortion rates? Could a woman abort if she could could see these pictures?
In fairness, the vice-regal trip does include some worthy conferences and panel discussions people like Peter Adams of the Makivik Corp. in Kuujjuaq and Fibbie Tatti, the Languages Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, might find useful. And a stop at the University of Helsinki will give Ralston Saul an opportunity to let Finnish intellectuals hear his end-of-globalization speech.
But overall, this trip looks like a waste of tax money. There might be no vice in it, but it's far too regal. If Clarkson suggested it, she shouldn't have. If the government suggested it, she should have refused.
Check for yourself whether this trip is a worthy use of Canadian taxpayers’ dollars:
Quest for the Modern North
Detailed Itinerary
· Russia
· Finland
· Iceland
Do look at Delegate Biographies for some of what it takes to be invited for a trip with our GG and her consort. As an example, delegates include Dyane Adam, our Commissioner of Official Languages.
[Dyane Adam is committed] to achieving social justice and the recognition of the minority rights of Francophones, . . . .
A researcher and lecturer, Dr. Adam is the author of many publications on bilingualism in Canada. Her most recent works include "Official Languages in the Canadian Sport System: Getting a Second Wind!" (2003), "Official Languages and Immigration: Obstacles and Opportunities for Immigrants and Communities" (2002) and "French on the Internet: Key to the Canadian Identity and the Knowledge of Economy" (2002).
or Fibbie Tatti, one of whose concerns is strategies for preserving Aboriginal languages and the development of Aboriginal language curricula in other jurisdictions in Canada.
She also undertook the task of developing the first Dene languages curriculum, enabling students from kindergarten to grade 9 to study in their own language. She has since assisted in the development of Aboriginal language curricula in other jurisdictions in Canada.
This experience led to her participation in a tour of Russia in 1990 during which she spoke on issues related to the development of educational curricula for Aboriginal students and on strategies for preserving Aboriginal languages.
Language -- key to personal and economic development for Canada and the North.
