Daddy, we hardly knew you

It concerns the case of a man who has been labelled a "deadbeat dad" and had his unemployment cheque garnished. Some Californian woman claimed that a "tall, black man named Anthony Pierce is the father of my child". Tony Pierce, who is only 5' 9" and so white-looking that he could pass for a caucasian was called on by a female police officer to advise him of the charge. What she did not tell him was that he had only 30 days to appeal the charge. . . . He was being garnished each month to pay for this unknown kid.

In case you think that is happening only in the "States", you should think again. Canada is one of the worst offenders in this regard, as the "ladies with a cause" continue to hijack common sense.

[. . . .] During Paul Martin's more upbeat elaboration yesterday, a story from the Post kept pushing into my mind. It was about how Ottawa's Ministry of Health had approved a bill for $153,064 submitted by the head of a Manitoba addiction centre. The bill was from a Caribbean jewellery store. An assistant deputy minister at the Ministry had allegedly been on the take from the same centre's head to the tune of some $200,000. All this without the apparent knowledge of those higher up in the department, including deputy minister David Dodge, now head of the Bank of Canada, and then health minister Alan Rock. Current Health Minister Pierre Pettigrew -- the man who presided over the HRDC scandal but dodged the bullet, which in fact never seemed to find any target -- had declared there would be no public inquiry.

If cinematic parodies, monstrous corruption and absence of bureaucratic oversight are alleged to be a biased version of Ottawa, then Paul Martin's agenda surely pushes the envelope much farther at the other end: straining credulity to the limit.

[. . . .] more meddling, more fiddling, more expenditure -- all hidden under the keyword "change."

[. . . .] "Action Plan for Democratic Reform" [. . . .]more free votes, more gabbing in committees, more "active" parliamentary secretaries -- will do nothing in terms of the reason why parliaments are there in the first place: to restrain the excesses of government. Parliament will remain a lap dog. The need for public inquiries -- as in the jewellery heist above -- will continue to guarantee that they won't happen.

[. . . .] "strengthen Canada's social foundations." That is, shore up the crumbling redistributionist state that criminalizes private medical care and encourages comprehensive dependency. After all, dependents vote.

[. . . .] In line with making a bigger splash on the world stage, drug companies' property will be expropriated in the name of poor AIDS sufferers, under the reintroduction of what will now be called "The Jean Chretien Pledge to Africa Act."

He pledged. Drug companies pay.

A $6-million steal-to-order ring operating out of Pearson airport used the internet and Toronto stores to fence big-ticket items spotted on manifests of incoming flights. Ring members stole millions of dollars yearly from arriving cargo, employed a dozen people from drivers to sales reps to move and sell the goods and posted the hot items for sale on eBay and three other Web sites, Peel police said yesterday.

Pallets of computers, cameras, jewelry, name- brand perfumes and clothing, mink coats and even dentures were regularly loaded on trucks with legitimate shipments even though security cameras were rolling, police said.

A North York man pleaded guilty Friday to heading what has been called one of the largest airport theft rings in Canadian history.

Police officers from Peel, York, the OPP and the RCMP seized $3.5 million in stolen goods, almost $1.3 million in Canadian and U.S. cash, four gold bricks and a $600,000 North York home when they smashed the ring in December, 2001.

[. . . .] The ringleader, Hoa Lam Ong, 48, also known as "Smiley," of Toronto, pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property over $5,000 and conspiracy to possess stolen property. He will be sentenced March 9.

Ong was among 12 people charged in December, 2001 when the ring was smashed by police in a four-year undercover operation called "Project Undertow." Charges were stayed by the Crown against 10 others.

Also convicted of theft offences was Tawnya Ward, 25, who police said was in charge of the group's on-line operations.

[. . . .] It took a four-year undercover probe and cops from Peel, York, OPP and RCMP to nab Hoa Lam Ong, 48, aka "Smiley," who headed a $6-million steal-to-order ring.

[. . . .] He said the airport smugglers, thieves and crooks can detect undercover cops, and police have to be creative.

[. . . .] Arrested last month was an Air Canada ramp worker who was charged with trying to smuggle 29 kilos of hash oil, worth about $1 million, into the country. Another employee was arrested last November after 10 kilos of cocaine, worth about $4 million, was found in a rental truck inside the airport's cargo area.

Two weeks ago, $1 million in cocaine, was found in a suitcase hidden above a luggage conveyer belt.

OTTAWA -- Forget the furor over Janet Jackson's breast-baring stunt during the Super Bowl telecast -- more Canadians were apparently upset by a beer commercial showing two women kissing. The federal broadcast regulator said yesterday that it had received three written complaints about Jackson's staged breast pop-out during a dance number, while 10 people wrote to complain about the Labatt beer commercial.

[. . . .] The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is an independent, non-governmental organization created by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters to administer standards established by its members.

A Toronto pilot who is on a terrorist watchlist is being helped by Transport Canada and his union to clear his name so he doesn't face intense grilling when flying to the U.S. The man, who is a Canadian citizen with an Irish name, has been pulled aside for questioning three times in the past two weeks while trying to board his flights to the U.S.

"He is frustrated," said Art LaFlamme of the Air Line Pilots Association. "He has done nothing wrong and has no convictions."

[. . . .] "He is being singled out for reasons not known to him," he said. "This man has been flying for 17 years."

Toronto's blacks must act urgently to end the violence plaguing their community, a pastor said yesterday in a powerful address at a funeral for the city's latest murder victim. "Things have got to go in a different route or we're going to kill ourselves," Pastor Orim Meikle told mourners at the Odgen Funeral Home in Scarborough.

"We're committing genocide on our own culture. We need to stop sugar-coating things."

Meikle warned that funerals like the one yesterday for Omar Kente Hortley, 21, will be held every week for young black men until the community unites to end the wave of violence.

"Our children carry guns like we used to carry bubblegum," he said, turning his attention to dozens of Hortley's grieving friends.

"Let's make change. Come out of the gangs. Go home and throw away your guns. If you're carrying it, it's because you plan to use it. You're walking murder."

The Rhema Christian Ministries' preacher pulled no punches in his highly charged address, sayings blacks must stop denying there's a problem in their community.

"We need to show responsibility. We need to speak in plain language," he said. "We're in a place now that we can't keep blaming slavery for everything.

[. . . .] he told mourners the root of the problem is that parents and lawmakers have backed away from discipline, like spanking and curfews.

"We set crazy laws that teach us not to discipline our children yet we bury them once a week.

"Fathers, you need to step back in the home. Away with absentee fathers," he said. "We're breeding children as if they're racehorses. We need to do things differently in our community."

Meikle ended his fierce address by urging young men and women to return to school and "build" families.

[. . . .] "When are we going to learn the absence of discipline is death? Our children carry guns like we used to carry bubblegum. Our children are made to feel they need to be tough - especially in our black culture - that it creates manhood and virility within you. Most of our children spend half their lives in jail. It's the second home in our community

"Things have got to change ... or we're going to kill ourselves. We're committing genocide in our own culture. We're glorifying violence. Parents, you're not setting rules in your own home.

"We're not working as a community to eradicate violence ... (In the media, our youth) are made to feel as if they need to sell drugs to be significant, to be part of gangs, to be going places ...

[. . . .] Sometimes, one man's courage can just leave you speechless. This is one of those times.

[. . . .] All that has really happened is that the (Conservative) party membership has at long last taken control of the party, after the succession of bumblers, opportunists and Liberal wannabes that have led it over the years. Many conservatives were forced to spend several years in exile, as members of the Reform/Alliance parties. But now they have a Conservative party that actually represents them. That they have returned to the fold does not mean that the wheel has come full circle, or that the Reform experience was a 15 year waste of time -- another bit of conventional media wisdom, though curiously at odds with the first.

The Conservative party they left had grown irredeemably corrupt, intellectually and otherwise. The rediscovery of classical liberalism that swept across the western world in the 1970s and 1980s, though it found its followers among Canadian conservatives as elsewhere, failed to penetrate the Tory leadership. The party elites had in consequence grown completely out of touch with their members.

The Mulroney experience proved the party was unreformable: ill at ease with markets, impervious to demands for a more democratic politics, in thrall to Quebec nationalists.[. . . .] .

POSTSCRIPT: Anyone who wants to see just how far gone the party grandees had become has only to read Lowell Murray's lament in the Globe from last fall, denouncing the merger. What proud accomplishments does he list in defence of the old Tory party? In every case, they involve the party leadership's brave and courageous support of .... Liberal party policies: medicare, bilingualism, and so on. [. . . .]

Don't get me wrong. I'm a supporter of these policies, too. But you'd think a man trying to save his party from "extinction" could come up with some evidence of its own unique contribution to Canadian politics.

OTTAWA - Parents take note: It is now "reflection room" instead of detention, "text-to-text connections" in place of book comparisons, and "Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading" instead of, well, reading.

Jargon has long been a part of the lexicon of education bureaucrats, but "eduspeak" has only recently begun infiltrating classrooms across the country.

"They have a reflection time instead of a detention.[. . . .]"USSR" -- Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading. [That is not true. the term USSR was around and used in schools over 20 years ago -- which still does not make its use any better than calling it "silent reading period". NJC]

[. . . . ] New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service, which snagged its first contract in Canada to develop a standardized test in Ontario in 2002, refers to paragraphs as "constructed responses" and essays as "extended constructed responses."

[. . . .] University of Victoria education professor Thomas Fleming, a historian of schooling, says the arrival of "bafflegab" in the classroom has been a long time coming. [I would dispute this. Anyone with ambition to rise in the education bureaucracy long ago knew that it was good to learn and use the jargon. It intimidated other teachers, as well as parents. NJC]

[. . . .]"It's one thing for us to fool around with it, but imagine bringing that lack of clarity in your head as a teacher into the classroom, and now try to get students to understand what is pure, what is clear, what is right."

Former prime minister Jean Chretien has joined Calgary-based oil giant PetroKazakhstan Inc. as its special advisor for international relations.

Following the consulting path taken by many other former politicians, Mr. Chretien will help smooth PetroKazakhstan's relations with the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, where the company produces its oil, as well as with the countries to which it exports its products.

[. . . .]Since leaving politics late last year, he has become an international energy advisor at Bennett Jones, a prominent energy law firm in Calgary.

[. . . .]However, Wilf Gobert, a Peters & Co. analyst, said Mr. Chretien's personal views aren't necessarily the same as the policies he implemented as prime minister. [Now, that's interesting!]

"Kyoto was a political decision -- we all know that -- and what his personal interests or personal beliefs are is totally different," he said.

[. . . .]The former prime minister and PetroKazakhstan chief executive Bernard Isautier "go back many, many years," he added.

It's not uncommon for the two men to talk directly on the telephone to each other. Mr. Isautier is also experienced politically, having once acted as an advisor to the French energy and industry minister.

[. . . .] two of the sisters say, they were arrested by Iranian authorities on the suspicion of having boyfriends, locked in solitary confinement for 16 days, beaten with chains until they confessed to the "crime," and sentenced to 120 lashings.

The lawsuit claims if Ottawa did not bungle the sister's immigration applications they would have been out of Iran long before the torture occurred. "The plaintiffs' injuries were a reasonably foreseeable and proximate consequence of the defendant's negligence," reads the statement of claim, filed in the Federal Court of Canada.

Some observers worry the potential precedent from such a lawsuit could be dangerous, triggering a flood of dubious lawsuits from people eager to take advantage of Canada's generous immigration system.

"The fact is they are not Canadian citizens and we can't guarantee them all the whistles and bells," said Martin Collacott, a former Canadian ambassador. "We get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of applications and there is no way you can guarantee all of these will be processed precisely."

[. . . .]The sisters, who have remained silent on the issue since arriving in Canada two weeks ago, say they are speaking out in an attempt to save their brother, 36-year-old Mohsen Mofidi, who remains in an Iranian prison and is scheduled to be lashed next week.

[. . . .] Ms. Magd then applied for permanent resident status, naming as dependents her three daughters -- Mahfam, Mahdis and Nika Nahasati -- and her abusive husband.

That she sought to support the same man who beat her caught the attention of Canadian immigration officials, who immediately delayed her application. It was the beginning of a long line of alleged errors that the sisters say ultimately left them open to torture in their home country.

They said that their mother only included their father as a dependent so that he would approve their passports (a necessity under Iranian law). Ms. Magd, they say, had no intention of bringing her husband to Canada and as soon as the women had their passports, he was dropped as a dependent.

With the start of the annual Muslim festival of Eid al Adha on Sunday, drawing thousands of believers from around Washington state to Seattle for prayer, political activists saw an opportunity. A team of volunteers roamed the crowd, or manned booths, signing up those qualified to vote. A major push for Muslim voter registration drive was on at similar gatherings throughout the country.

Coming on the heels of the Hajj, the holiday draws out devout Muslims as well as more casual followers. "It's a perfect opportunity for people to exercise their responsibility and become more politically aware," says Hasan Mansouri, government affairs coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the national groups running the registration drive. "And it comes at a perfect time, about a month before Super Tuesday."

Never before have the stakes seemed so high for Muslim Americans.

[. . . .]To the extent that the get-out-the-Muslim-vote effort succeeds, it will largely benefit the Democrats because it is energized by anger over the Bush administration's Patriot Act and what is perceived as an anti-Muslim bias behind the Iraq Iraq war and Israeli-Palestinian policy.

[. . . .] According to CAIR, 78 percent of Muslims voted Republican in 2000. It was a departure from previous elections, when this community tended to side with the health and education policies of Democrats. But conservative family values that Bush touted were attractive, as was his hints that he would seek to eliminate the 1996 Secret Evidence Act, which many Muslims believe targets members of their community.

[. . . .] Whether Muslims come out to vote, he says, will be influenced by two hard-to-measure factors: "If Democratic candidates involve and include Muslims in their campaigns, many will come out and vote," he says. "If (Attorney General John) Ashcroft, or the Bush team, creates a kind of fear complex in hearts of Muslims, or a fear of retribution, then they may not come. A lot of Muslims feel intimidated in light of the Patriot Act, and (use of) secret evidence, where anything could happen."

In Michigan, where the race could potentially be close, Arab Americans make up about 100,000 of the state's 4 million voters. Their vote could swing local races as well as the state's presidential vote, but they are also a well-established, and relatively well-to-do immigrant constituency that could influence the outcome in other ways. "The Arab vote is important and it is important to get them involved because they are willing to contribute financially and contribute workers for campaigns," says Ed Sarpolous, vice president EPIC-MRA, an independent polling firm in Lansing, Mich.

Democratic opportunity

The opportunity of garnering Muslim and Arab American votes has not been lost on the Democratic candidates.

Muslim and Arab American voter sites
• The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) run-down on policy positions of President George Bush and the Democratic candidates
• Muslim Electorates' Council of America (MECA) voter information site
• Arab American Institute (AAI) looks at positions held by Democratic candidates on issues of interest to the Arab American population

MONTREAL -- A Leger Marketing poll [. . . .] If Belinda Stronach, also known as B.S., is running neck-and-neck with Harper among ordinary Canadians, it must mean that they are not paying attention.

Herein lies the danger of the apathetic public. It is what allows a rookie candidate, who so far has shown no substance, to be considered leadership material. The less attention Canadians pay to politics, the better it is for those in the business of politics.
[. . . .] I should tell you folks that while the poll shows that 18% of Canadians favour B.S. and another 18% prefer Stephen Harper, Tony Clement is also on the list, pulling less than 10% support. It means the majority of those responding to the poll had no opinion or felt none of the candidates was qualified to lead.

My e-mail inbox is filled with letters from the so-called grassroots members of the new party. Most of them belonged to the Canadian Alliance. Very few of them plan to work or vote for the Conservative party of Canada if B.S. wins.

In business it is often said that Money Talks and Bull---- Walks. Right now you would be safe in concluding that if B.S. talks to the country as leader of the new party, many of those who are not voting for her will take a walk.

[. . . .] And no westerner believes that B.S. is electable for the simple reason that nobody in the country will take seriously the idea of B.S. being prime minister.

Western Canadian small-c conservatives pay lots of attention to American politics. They have noticed that the people of Iowa and New Hampshire have said it loudly and clearly. Electability counts.

[. . . .] What happens if B.S. wins the leadership by virtue of gerrymandering the vote by buying up memberships for nonexistent people in Quebec? (Yes, that's been done before. Names have been literally scribbled off tombstones in Quebec graveyards. It is not an urban myth. It is Conservative reality.)

"Why don't you learn why the German people were willing to follow Hitler in the early years? It's amazing what starvation and poverty will prompt in a human against those who brought about their starvation and poverty.

"I am sick of this idea that Germans did not have reason to hate the Jews,

[. . . .] "He who has the gold makes the rules. Who owns your bank Michael?"

[. . . .] Jewish politicians actually had some solutions to the political and financial malaise. They and their policies were rejected because, well, because they were Jewish - even though they had lived in Germany for hundreds of years.

[. . . .] I suppose all Jews are rich and powerful. Apart from the ones that aren't. Just like all Scots are cheap, apart from the ones that aren't. All Irish stupid, apart from the ones that aren't. All Canadians naive and boring, apart from the ones that aren't. Or all Germans racist bullies, apart from the ones that aren't.

God bless Germany and the Germans. God bless the Jews, God bless everybody. The good ones, the bad ones and the ones in between.