Canada the Broken

But don't take my word for it:

Our national government is meant to foster a sense of Canadian identity. What are those running for office putting on offer? What is their vision of Canada?

(Sidebar: it is not up to the government to form a national identity. They've done that and all that they can come up with is that we are "not American". It is up to the people to be Canadian, something we didn't need elitist @$$holes to do for us.)

Mark Carney’s Liberals have the toughest challenge. For more than a decade, the Liberals ran a government that sought to reconfigure our national identity — eliminating Canadian symbols that the intelligentsia told us were shameful. Canadians had much to apologize for. We needed to decolonize, to become more diverse. Above all, the story was of the harm caused by Canadian history.

It ought to be clear now that this decade of guilt-ridden national shame left Canada vulnerable — faced with a genuine national threat but with an open-question. If Canada is such a terrible place why would anyone defend it?

 

Indeed.

But we can be fleeced.

 

 

Without a Sir John A. MacDonald, there would be no Canada to hate:

Any future Conservative cabinet will again commemorate military exploits, John A. Macdonald and “our common Canadian identity,” Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. Federal historical revisionism “weakened the bonds that used to tie us together,” he said: “We will be naming public monuments after Macdonald and many of our other historical figures.”

 

 

 

We don't air-lift enough people to North Korea, staple Go Pros to their heads and watch the live-stream of their fumbling about in broken Chinese about wi-fi service.

The entertainment value of that alone is worth the cost of jet fuel:

Many college students have fallen for Marx and his various minions through the indoctrination of professors who speak fondly of socialism and communism, but have never lived in a socialist or communist country.

 

But socialism is not a new idea. It’s been tried and it has failed spectacularly and violently everywhere it’s been done.

 

Let’s get the raw numbers out of the way.

 

In the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics: Some estimate up to 20 million deaths — many through starvation — under one overweight, mustachioed socialist Stalin.

 

In the so-called People’s Republic of China: Another 40 million died under a similarly overweight, though bare-faced socialist Mao Tse-Tung.

 

The killing and starvation continue under modern socialist regimes – the United Nations estimates there were over 5,200 executions in Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela in 2018 alone. It’s clear that socialism kills.

If those numbers are a bit too abstract for your newly Marx-loving nephew or niece, they should listen to stories from people who lived under socialist regimes.

 

SecondStreet.org’s Survivors of Socialism project has spoken with many Canadians who fled socialist and communist countries all over the world.

 

One of them was Vancouverite Yali Trost, who lived in China before some economic reforms made it a less brutal (though still oppressive) dictatorship. She told us about how, in keeping with the regime’s One Child Policy, police would arrest pregnant women on the street and commit forced abortion. On top of that, free speech was nonexistent — you always had to worry about saying the wrong thing to your neighbour, lest they tell the authorities and you wind up in a jail cell.

 

Aime Despagne, a Toronto woman originally from Cuba, described how a friend of hers was tossed in prison for the crime of protesting their socialist government. While in a tiny jail cell, he was served meals from the same bucket he had to use as a tiny bathroom.

 

Even in countries that are no longer socialist, the wounds of the past can be felt. During a recent trip to Lithuania, formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, I received dirty looks when I shared with Lithuanians that I had visited a Russian Orthodox Church in their country. Simply hearing the word “Russian” set them off — the memories of socialist oppression run deep.

 

This column barely scratches the surface. Many books could be (and have been) filled with the stories of those who have suffered and died under socialism. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago trilogy is an excellent place to start. But if the young socialist in your life doesn’t quite have the patience for such a long read, encourage them to speak with people who have lived in socialist countries.

 

Perhaps one of the tales of incredible human suffering will convince them that socialism’s flowery ideas are, quite simply, lies.

 

 

Can't you threaten them with euthanasia?:

After the sixth blow to her head, Natasha Poirier stopped counting.

She felt certain she was going to die. “He is here to hurt me, and hurt me badly,” she remembered thinking before slumping to the floor on her knees.

Her attacker would later claim he’d blacked out, that he couldn’t remember a thing except high-pitched screams, a defence the judge in his criminal trial rejected.

He was angry, New Brunswick Provincial Court judge Yvette Finn would rule, he was aware of what he was doing “and simply did not care.”

One mid-afternoon in March 2019, Poirier, then a nurse manager in the fourth-floor surgical unit at Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton, N.B., was cornered in her office and beaten by Bruce Randolph “Randy” Van Horlick in a wholly unexpected, unprovoked and vicious assault, “a flagrant and outrageous assertion of power” over an innocent victim, as noted by one judge in a summary of the case.

Van Horlick, 69 at the time and twice Poirier’s weight, was unhappy that his wife had been moved from a quiet room down the hall to a room closer to the nurses’ station when he went looking for Poirier.

After poking his head into Poirier’s office and informing her she had a major problem on her hands and three seconds to decide what she was going to do to fix it, Van Horlick pulled Poirier by her hair from her chair, punched her multiple times on the head and threw her twice against a wall.

He was sentenced to six months incarceration and two years’ probation for attacking Poirier and a second nurse who heard her boss’s screams and lunged at Van Horlick to pull him off. He assaulted her as well, before returning to battering Poirier, court heard. ...

(Sidebar: problem right there. Six months? Why even bother?!) 

Violence against nurses and other hospital staff most often occurs in the emergency department, though it doesn’t discriminate and there’s a growing sense of alarm that a decades-old problem is becoming more frequent, more severe and more reprehensible. “People’s health and lives are at stake,” medical and nursing leaders recently warned.

Who or what is to blame? There are many factors. An increasingly hostile and toxic world. A distressed, overcrowded and understaffed medical system that’s led to dangerous waits for care and boiling frustrations. Violent patient behaviours driven by drugs, psychosis and dementia. And inconsistent or inadequate security in hospitals, with no real accountability for the laxity.

 

A fool and his money, ect:

After placing a framed photo of U.S. President Donald Trump on a table, Matthew Burke steps back and takes a mighty swing with a baseball bat. Glass shatters as the frame explodes. The obliterated image vanishes.

Satisfied with his effort, the 14-year-old — dressed in dark coveralls, a paintball mask and body armour — high-fives his older sister and mother.

Welcome to the Rage Room in Halifax, where clients have been lining up to take part in the "SMASH The Tariffs Special Event."

With the purchase of a regular smash room package, such as "Anger Management," or "Parental Leave,"  every patron gets a free Trump picture to destroy at will. Framed photos of Vice-President JD Vance and Tesla CEO Elon Musk cost an extra $5, with proceeds going to local food banks.

 

Because of course this takes place in Nova Scotia.