The Creation of Perfection Is No Error

Absolutely not.


I had to re-read this (emphasis mine):

The Student Federation of the University of Ottawa used student union dues to bus about 50 student protesters to June's G20 Summit in Toronto, in what the president of the campus Conservatives says is a "blatant misuse" of student fees.

''I highly doubt that every single student who has to pay those fees would be happy to know their money was being spent to send a few individuals to protest for the weekend," Peter Flynn said.

Mr. Flynn said the decision to use student federation budgets to rent the bus was an example of a "cabal of certain individuals using student money-at-large to donate it to their own pet projects."

The federation's Student Appeal Centre, Foot Patrol, Women's Resource Centre and Pride Centre combined resources from their student-funded budgets to come up with nearly $1,000 to rent the bus.

"What does Foot Patrol have to do with protesting?" Mr. Flynn said, adding that concern over the bus rental was raised at a federation board meeting on Sunday. "It's mandated to get students home safe, not send them to Toronto."

Federation president Tyler Steeves said the union was just doing its job by aiding student participation in the protests. "We try to capture the passions of our students and help students to pursue them, whether that means setting up intramural sports leagues or renting a bus so they can protest something they care about," he said. "We're helping them be involved in activities that make university special."

The U of O group is not the only student federation facing controversy over sending protesters to the G20.

According to the Phoenix, the student newspaper at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, two members of the school's student union, Grayson Lepp and Kirk Chavarie, used student funds to fly to Toronto to protest the summit.

The two were arrested on June 27 and charged with conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. They are scheduled to appear in a Toronto court on Aug. 23.

Is this the same University of Ottawa that drove Ann Coulter away with a band of rent-some-thugs? The article above illustrates perfectly: (a) why students should NEVER have to pay student fees and (b) why there should be an independent body to hold these "cabals" to account and make them re-pay the money wasted on roving gangs of spoiled little Canadians who think torching cars and smashing windows is somehow a constructive way to help the starving masses all over the globe. Oh! I forgot. They don't care about the starving masses of the world, only if daddy's money can get them out of the mess they find themselves in.

My mistake.

**

I think I can pin-point the problem here (again, with emphasis):

In the isolated town of Stoneville, N.L., population less than 500, residents are starting to wonder what to do about an eight-year-old boy whose behaviour has long concerned them, but has now grown violent.

First, it was a dog bludgeoned to death with a barbecue utensil in June. And now it's a dozen ducks, hens and chicks kept in a backyard as pets, found beaten with gardening tools on Tuesday.

The boy, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, has admitted to both attacks, police say, although he is too young to be charged with a criminal offence. It is believed that the boy used gardening tools he found in the shed of Cory Hodder to kill the birds. Some were so badly abused they had to be euthanized...

The boy wanders over to her house and seems to have no adult supervision, she said. He's even been out in the neighbourhood since the incident on Tuesday night.

One woman, who is an aunt to both the boy's unmarried parents, who are cousins, said his parents don't get along. "Sometimes I think it's the way they're reared up," she said.

The father will shoot "a bird, a duck, a seagull, anything that moves," Ms. Gillingham said. When interviewed last month after the boy killed Cuddles, a black Pomeranian belonging to Emma and Norman Hodder, the father largely shrugged the incident off: "Yeah, it's not a very good thing for him to do but the dog is dead, you can't bring him back.''

One day there will be a documentary on this little darling with the townsfolk scratching their heads and wondering how this boy graduated from killing small animals, to setting fires, to killing drifters and prostitutes and finally killing college students before being ploddingly stopped by the local constabulary. "What could have turned this boy into a monster and how could we have let it go on?" What, indeed.


**

Why kid-gloves are horrid things:

The night Canadian Master Corporal Darrell Priede of Brantford died in Afghanistan, the Afghan war took a sudden dangerous new twist.

A stream of secret U.S. military intelligence reports released this week by the WikiLeaks website suggests the May 2007 death was the result of a Taliban attack with a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile launched from the shoulder.

In all likelihood, the deadly weapon was provided by Iran.

Those two facts alone may be transforming the almost nine-year-old Afghan war.

Iran has long been suspected of covertly supplying arms to the Taliban, but the WikiLeaks data dump suggests it could now be almost as crucial to the Afghan insurgency as Pakistan.

Summaries of classified U.S. military and diplomatic reports among the documents demonstrate a growing concern over Iran's influence in Afghanistan and catalogue fears Iran's Revolutionary Guard is waging a secret campaign to arm, train, fund and equip the Afghanistan insurgency.

Master Cpl. Priede's death may have been a point of convergence for those fears...

Iran and the Taliban dislike each other. They have a history of animosity that almost erupted into war in the 1990s, when the Taliban's Sunni fundamentalists murdered thousands Afghan Hazara Shiites and killed 11 Iranian diplomats.

That hostile relationship has gradually become a more collaborative one as Iran's relations with the United States and the West deteriorated.

Once again, Iran kills a Canadian and the kid gloves stay on.

**

When in France...

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, proposed tough measures yesterday to fight crime, delinquency and illegal immigration as he looks to shore up his support amid scandals and low ratings ahead of 2012 elections.

Speaking in Grenoble, the scene of riots two weeks ago sparked by the death of a man of Arab origin who was fleeing the police, Mr. Sarkozy partly blamed immigration for a breakdown in society.

"We are suffering from 50 years of lax immigration regulation which has led to a failure of integration," he said in a defiant speech.

Lax immigration policies are certainly no walk in the park but failure to integrate new immigrants lies squarely with the existing population. Before one is tarred as cruel, consider that integration is a fact of life and was done before in much less understanding and supporting circumstances. No one is doing a favour to either the immigrant or native population by not enforcing existing mores or customs. Why not make the immigrants' new home a welcome one? Would it not be easier to familiarise the newcomer with the official language and customs than deal with burning cars?


Speaking of language...

Quebec, once the notorious milieu for French-English sparring, appears to have passed the baton east to a less likely hornet's nest: New Brunswick, where language tensions have recently shifted from latent to feverish.

In the past month alone, a smattering of linguistic duels have emerged across New Brunswick --which, as it happens, is Canada's only officially bilingual province...

These days, in Moncton -- an officially bilingual city where two-thirds of the citizens consider themselves anglophone--a host of English-speaking business owners are petitioning against a proposed bylaw requiring all new commercial signs to be in French and English. And one Moncton businessman, who said he has received countless threatening phone calls from francophones yelling at him in a language he does not understand, said anglophones there are fed up with "forced bilingualism."

I'm fond of learning languages but not fond of being forced into multi-lingualism or being denied a job or place of business because of a rather militant minority. Any culture or language must be supported by the people who adhere to it. They run the risk of losing what they hold dear with the kind of "insistence" they exhibit. Sometimes it's best not to push.


**

Whatever your feelings on this topic, it is incredibly sad that a grandmother handing out pamphlets gets more jail time than Karla Holmolka:

Since Aug. 30, 1994, when a temporary injunction was placed around several abortion clinics in downtown Toronto at the request of the provincial attorney-general, Ms. Gibbons has been arrested roughly 20 times and has been behind bars eight of the past 16 years -- more time than Karla Homolka.

She served an earlier six-month stretch for a protest in front of a Morgentaler clinic in 1992. Her most recent stint behind bars began in January 2009.

Instead of standing back the required distance from a clinic as her fellow protesters had done for years, she once again walked within the forbidden bubble zone.

She held up a sign that showed a drawing of a baby that read: "Why Mom, when I have so much life to give?"

If she would only comply, Ms. Gibbons could be out on $500 bail in mere days, thereby breaking her tortuous 16-year cycle of arrest and imprisonment. But until the injunction is quashed, she will refuse bail, insisting that would be "compromise and complicity with evil" and, to her, unthinkable.

To those inside Canada's antiabortion movement, Linda Gibbons is a quiet hero whose sacrifice is to be admired.

"I didn't have the courage to break the injunction," says retired high school teacher John Bulsza, of London, who was named in the original injunction in August 1994. "Every one of us should have protested with her and this case would be history. She's our Gandhi and we're letting her take the fall for the rest of us."

To her detractors, though, she is a self-aggrandizing pain in the ass who has no respect for the rights of others. They see nothing honourable in her commitment to the cause. She is simply another self-delusional fanatic with a martyr complex.

*"What people like her do is creepy," says Celia Posyniak, an abortion clinic director in Calgary. "They don't even have to say anything. It's intimidating just to have someone standing there."

"Why is it acceptable to intimidate women making a personal and legal decision?"

Ms. Posyniak has no respect for Ms. Gibbons, even for being so persistent.

(* How about- for the refreshing honesty- she just admits that Mrs. Gibbons is bad for business?)

Trudeau's Canada- where free expression and congress are punished but killers walk free.