EDMONTON -- Anne McLellan expressed sympathy Saturday to the wives of three RCMP officers killed on duty who want the federal Treasury Board to change an outdated policy which saddled them with large funeral expenses after burying their husbands.

But the deputy prime minister said it is not an issue the government of Canada involves itself in.

[. . . . ] Sherwood Park Conservative MP Ken Epp, who raised the issue in the House of Commons, called the Treasury Board policy regarding RCMP funeral expenses "outrageous."

"It should be an automatic given that when a police officer dies with their boots on they should have their funeral expenses covered in full," Epp said Friday.

In the interim, the RCMP should immediately reimburse any widow of an officer killed on duty who had to pay funeral expenses, he said. [. . . . ]

It's a good thing that most of Canada's war dead are buried in foreign lands.

If they weren't, my guess is those cemeteries would have been plowed under by now by our gutless leaders for fear that the sight of all of those crosses -- more than 160,000 of them -- might offend someone.

I keep wondering too when the famous war poem -- In Flanders Fields will be banned from ever being uttered in Canada at Remembrance Day services by virtue of the fact that it mentions the word cross, and that might cause offence to those easily offended souls out there so eager to accept our freedom, prosperity, generosity and tolerance but not the ethic, sacrifice and traditions that created all of that in the first place. [. . . . ]

Add to the Land of the Maple Leaf’s mounting politically correct garbage heap, the Maltese Cross badge on the caps of Department of Defence chaplains.

It didn’t take them long, the Canadian Department of Defence, which only a year ago hired its first Muslim chaplain, is stripping the Maltese Cross from the caps of its chaplains.

Already tossed on the politically correct garbage heap, the practice of giving Gideon Bibles to new Canadians at government swearing in ceremonies, as announced by Canadian Immigration officials a few months ago; any reference to the Christian God at anniversary ceremonies for September 11, as proclaimed by Prime Minister Paul Martin and his predecessor Jean Chretien.

The Canadian government is hell-bent for leather on high road toward a multi-cultural, multi-faith society.

The Maltese Cross, a Christian symbol dating all the back to the Crusades, is being retired in the name of Canada’s fast-growing multi-faith society.

[. . . . ] The debate on removing the Maltese Cross will be up for discussion by a Commons committee before a final decision is rendered by the military. [. . . . ]

It was supposed to be an attempt to enforce international law against a dangerous aggressor, but we sophisticates knew better all along.

The French moved into the little but chocolate-rich African nation of Ivory Coast ostensibly to enforce a cease-fire between warring parties. But then they unleashed a shock-and-awe campaign against that country on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Just because the Ivorians broke a cease-fire and attacked French troops, killing nine of them plus the required American aid worker, France has been using, in Kofi Annan's phrase, disproportionate force in response to terror.

Let it be noted that France undertook this high-handed, preemptive policy without any authorization beforehand from the U.N. Security Council or even its own parliament, though it sought international support after the fact. [. . . . ]

This is the work of a small circle of ever-scheming neoconservatives around President Chirac who have plotted to seize the Ivory Coast's cocoa fields for years. And yet the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has not used his veto to stop the Security Council from approving the French action. Where is the world's conscience?

Just wait until Michael Moore exposes this whole rotten plot in his next blockbuster documentary, which will show a host of suspicious ties between France's ruling clique and Ivorian cocoa sheikhs. The rest of Hollywood will surely weigh in at any moment, led by Whoopi Goldberg and her minions. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Clarke's ratty impatience with the outspoken Charles perfectly illustrates what is wrong with the Education Secretary's latest policy initiative, which has been forgotten in the furore.

This policy, which will now force all schools to take their quota of pupils who have been expelled for bad behaviour, is terribly wrong [. . . . ]

I couldn't slap [Lancel Hendricks] down in public, I couldn't tell him to "think more carefully" about his language, I couldn't even insist that he left my classroom.

Let me explain. For a few months I had been teaching a Year 9 English class with reasonable success in an average London comprehensive - not dissimilar to thousands of schools throughout the country in terms of intake and results - when Lancel arrived.

Lancel had been permanently excluded from his previous school for pulling a knife on another pupil and systematic bad behaviour.

The school I was teaching in was obliged to take him because the local education authority had a policy of "inclusion": that is, it didn't have any "special schools" where it could send emotionally and psychologically damaged children. [. . . . ]

Ottawa has settled the country's first immigration class-action lawsuit, and will pay $2.9-million in legal fees to more than 260,000 prospective immigrants and process their applications under older, more lenient selection criteria.

The settlement averts a costly trial, and gives renewed hope to doctors in Iran, teachers in South Africa and information-technology engineers in China who have been waiting as long as five years to find out whether they qualify to immigrate to Canada under the point system.

[. . . .] But a parliamentary committee found the department grossly underestimated the numbers in the backlog, which totalled 120,000 people, and the time it would take to process their applications. [. . . . ]

Patrick McClarty is a Canadian blogger who has recently been receiving threatening email messages from someone claiming to be me. The person in question is using a Hotmail account under the name warren_kinsella@hotmail.com. . . .

[. . . . ] This kind of crap is contrary to the Criminal Code.

[. . . . ] Calling all cyber-sleuths: contact me at warren@warrenkinsella.com, and I will flip you the threatening emails Patrick received. First guy or gal to crack the case gets autographed copies of a couple of my books (you pick), and the gratitude of Patrick and I.