Minister Baird, thank you. Thank you for standing up to the UN on the matter of North Korea chairing the disarmament panel!
There can be no doubt that the UN needs to change, it is a morally corrupt organization that kowtows and caters to the bullies of the world. I am glad to see the Conservative government taking this principled action.
While no other democracy has the courage to stand with us now, I have no doubt that we have started something. Canada is once again taking the lead on the world stage I am delighted.
There is a documentary called U.N. Me that was shown by The Free Thinking Film Society here in Ottawa that really got to the heart of what is wrong with the UN and I am glad to see that Canada is trying to fix it.
Kudos and congratulations!!!!!!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Hey flotilla supporters - this is what you are supporting
Let's be clear on this. The suffering in Gaza is not happening because of Israel, it is happening because of Hamas and the cruelty of their sharia laws. It boggles the mind.
Hamas Declares War on…Male Hairstylists
Hamas Declares War on…Male Hairstylists
July 7, 2011 – 10:49 am
Fact is stranger than fiction – although this is a story that could have easily found its way into the Adam Sandler movie "You Don't Mess With The Zohan".
In this case, however, the facts are far from comedic. The BBC and others have reported that Hamas has arrested a man in Gaza for styling a woman's hair. This incident follows a law enacted last year which prohibits the practice as contrary to Sharia law.
The unfortunate Gazan in question is not the first to be targeted for this "crime". In February, five other male hairstylists in Gaza were similarly arrested, and were required to agree to an affidavit renouncing their work.
This development signals just one more step in Hamas' drive to create an increasingly Taliban-like environment in the Gaza Strip, rooted in its own radical interpretation of Islam. Since taking power of Gaza in its 2007 coup, Hamas has instituted "modesty patrols", shut down bars and theatres, banned lingerie displays, and prohibited women from riding in cars with unrelated men and smoking hookahs in public.
Court rules that illegal immigrants have no right to free health care
This is really good news! I am very please with this decision. Illegal immigrants should not be receiving free health care, I also think their children should not get a free education. Citizen contribute by way of paying taxes, voting and being invested to make this country a better place. Those would subvert the system to take advantage of our nature should be stopped in their tracks. I am sorry this lady is sick but she made choices not to become a citizen.
Illegal immigrants have no right to free health care: Court
Jul 8, 2011 – 7:00 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 8, 2011 8:32 PM ET
Illegal immigrants have no right to free health care: Court
Jul 8, 2011 – 7:00 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 8, 2011 8:32 PM ET
An illegal immigrant has no right to free medical intervention or ongoing health care under the Charter of Rights, the Federal Court of Appeal has ruled in a precedent-setting decision.
The ruling will help protect Canada from medical tourism, when people come to Canada expressly to get medical treatment paid for by the government, an immigration specialist said.
Nell Toussaint is a citizen of Grenada who came to Canada in 1999 as a visitor. Her visitor’s permit expired six months after her arrival, but she remained here without legal status.
In 2006, she developed kidney problems. She has received free medical care, but much more is needed. In 2008 she applied for a temporary residence permit that would make her eligible for the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. She did not pay the application fee, however, and her application was not processed.
Her health has since deteriorated.
In 2009, she applied to Citizenship and Immigration Canada for medical coverage under the Interim Federal Health Program, which offers emergency medical care for indigent people legally living in Canada. As an illegal immigrant, her application was declined.
With the backing of refugee support organizations and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association Ms. Toussaint appealed to the courts – seeking both to have her application fees to remain in Canada waived and to gain access to health coverage under the Charter of Rights, which grants the right to life and security of the person.
In May she won her appeal on the application fees, with the Federal Court ordering the government to reconsider its refusal. The Federal Court of Appeal, however, did not agree with her position on health care.
“The program could not have been intended to pay the medical expenses of those who arrive as visitors but remain illegally in Canada and who, after the better part of a decade of living illegally in Canada, suddenly choose to try to regularize their immigration status,” says the unanimous decision, written by David W. Stratas and released this week.
“The appellant by her own conduct … has endangered her life and health. The appellant entered Canada as a visitor. She remained in Canada for many years, illegally. Had she acted legally and obtained legal immigration status in Canada, she would have been entitled to coverage.”
The decision has been hailed as a significant and sensible one.
“This case is extremely important because it limits the potential claims that other classes of people in Canada may make for medical coverage, such as visitors or those without any status and under the radar, of which the number is currently unknown but estimated in the hundreds of thousands,” said Sergio Karas, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and analyst.
Iris Fischer, a lawyer who argued for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association on Ms. Toussaint’s behalf, said covering crucial treatment is in accordance with international and humanitarian principles: “The CCLA is disappointed that the Federal Court of Appeal did not recognize that a denial of health care to Ms. Toussaint in these life threatening circumstances violates her right to life and to equality.”
National Post
ahumphreys@nationalpost.com
The ruling will help protect Canada from medical tourism, when people come to Canada expressly to get medical treatment paid for by the government, an immigration specialist said.
Nell Toussaint is a citizen of Grenada who came to Canada in 1999 as a visitor. Her visitor’s permit expired six months after her arrival, but she remained here without legal status.
In 2006, she developed kidney problems. She has received free medical care, but much more is needed. In 2008 she applied for a temporary residence permit that would make her eligible for the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. She did not pay the application fee, however, and her application was not processed.
Her health has since deteriorated.
In 2009, she applied to Citizenship and Immigration Canada for medical coverage under the Interim Federal Health Program, which offers emergency medical care for indigent people legally living in Canada. As an illegal immigrant, her application was declined.
With the backing of refugee support organizations and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association Ms. Toussaint appealed to the courts – seeking both to have her application fees to remain in Canada waived and to gain access to health coverage under the Charter of Rights, which grants the right to life and security of the person.
In May she won her appeal on the application fees, with the Federal Court ordering the government to reconsider its refusal. The Federal Court of Appeal, however, did not agree with her position on health care.
“The program could not have been intended to pay the medical expenses of those who arrive as visitors but remain illegally in Canada and who, after the better part of a decade of living illegally in Canada, suddenly choose to try to regularize their immigration status,” says the unanimous decision, written by David W. Stratas and released this week.
“The appellant by her own conduct … has endangered her life and health. The appellant entered Canada as a visitor. She remained in Canada for many years, illegally. Had she acted legally and obtained legal immigration status in Canada, she would have been entitled to coverage.”
The decision has been hailed as a significant and sensible one.
“This case is extremely important because it limits the potential claims that other classes of people in Canada may make for medical coverage, such as visitors or those without any status and under the radar, of which the number is currently unknown but estimated in the hundreds of thousands,” said Sergio Karas, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and analyst.
Iris Fischer, a lawyer who argued for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association on Ms. Toussaint’s behalf, said covering crucial treatment is in accordance with international and humanitarian principles: “The CCLA is disappointed that the Federal Court of Appeal did not recognize that a denial of health care to Ms. Toussaint in these life threatening circumstances violates her right to life and to equality.”
National Post
ahumphreys@nationalpost.com
I couldn't agree more - and I know a lot of soldier who do too!
Spare the austerity, spoil the military
Christie Blatchford, National Post · Jul. 9, 2011 | Last Updated: Jul. 9, 2011 4:06 AM ET
With Canada's combat mission in Afghanistan ending this week and the nation awash in an attendant flurry of publicity, the usual questions are being asked: Was it worth the loss of "blood and treasure" (the common phrase, cloying in my view, for those who were killed or injured)? Did Canada achieve anything lasting? How will Afghanistan fare?
Good questions all, but a combat engineer and army major, Afghanistan veteran Mark Gasparotto, asks another: Whither the Canadian Forces?
In a thesis written for his master's in defence studies, Gasparotto examines four CF policies and concludes they collectively have served to weaken the army's operational effectiveness and undermine the martial spirit which ought to form the backbone of any fighting army.
All stem from efforts to make up for the shabby pay and treatment Canadian soldiers received in the 1990s (famously called the "decade of darkness" by former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier) and are rooted in high-minded intentions. All are meant to see that soldiers are welltaken care of by a grateful nation. All reflect the army's struggle to reconcile its traditional ideals (that soldiering is a calling, not just another job; that the unit and mission are more important than the individual, etc.) with those of a contemporary and increasingly individualistic society.
Thus the title of Gasparotto's brave paper -No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
The policies are (1) tour length (including a policy that provides a paid trip home from the theatre of war); (2) support to deployed troops (everything from the quality of food, gyms, barber services to availability of web access); (3) bonus "environmental duty allowances" (which pay deployed soldiers, depending on their length of service, anywhere from an extra $300 to $750 a month); and (4) socalled universality of service, which means that soldiers must meet a minimum fitness level, a requirement which is now being waived or bent for injured troops.
Gasparotto uses the results of his survey of senior officers and non-commis-sioned members -127 leaders anonymously completed the survey -to bolster his concerns. Fully 40% agreed or strongly agreed that the CF focus on troops' well-being threatens the primacy of mission success.
In Afghanistan, the standard Canadian tour for most of the duration of the mis-sion was six months, though that has recently been lengthened to eight. Because every soldier had to get home for leave, some were heading back to Canada for their break within a month of arriving, with the result that much of the time, units were at 80% combat effectiveness.
At Kandahar Air Field, where Canadians were based with troops from a dozen other countries, the creature comforts were significant. So accustomed have troops become to such amenities that after Canada's 2010 relief mission to Haiti, for instance, the commander lamented in a post-op brief that the "CF has lost the ability to go in austere."
Some survey respondents commented in particular on what Gasparotto calls "the insatiable appetite" of troops for web access to "remain connected to friends and family no matter where they are in the world or what they are doing on operations."
As one respondent said, "Any suggestion to go without air conditioners, video games and unlimited access to communicate back to Canada is met with anger."
In fact, using the army's own figures, Gasparotto shows that since 2006, "the CF spent an average 3.7 times more on its own infrastructure [in Afghanistan] than what it spent on reconstruction" for locals.
The environmental duty allowances, some respondents argued, have a similar deleterious effect.
Soldiers (and sailors and air crews, too, who receive different but equivalent bonuses; there are more than a dozen different kinds) become accustomed to the extra pay, and when posted to jobs, such as those at the army's own schools, which don't offer the allowances, will try to avoid taking them.
This is also telling of the vocation-versus-profession dilemma: If in order to recruit from a decreasing pool of potential candidates who have their generation's high expectations for personal satisfaction, the CF markets itself as simply another good employer, what is lost?
"The CF must redirect its energy by strengthening the intangible benefits of military service -the very ones that attracted most of its members at the outset to choose a career in the military," Gasparotto says. "It is by focusing on the intangible benefits that the CF can fortify the vocational model of duty . among a new generation of Canadians who want to serve their country."
The emotional universality-of-service issue may pose the single trickiest challenge.
At its simplest, it means that everyone in the army needs to be able to fight as an infantryman and pass a mandatory fitness test. A soldier who can't may stay in uniform on a temporary basis not to exceed three years.
But as troops began returning from Kandahar with grave injuries, both physical and stress-related, and in the face of a widely reported promise from then-boss Hillier that "no soldier wounded in Afghanistan will be released" without his okay, the policy wasn't universally applied, leaving the CF vulnerable to legal challenges from recruits who can't pass the minimum test.
More important, the survey suggests, is that while the vast majority of respondents believe the Canadian government is responsible for providing indefinite care to injured soldiers, and that wounded warriors must get all the help they need, the CF itself must not be allowed to become what one respondent called "an alternate form of welfare."
The survey asked respondents if these policies, adopted since Afghanistan, are sustainable -emotionally, operationally and materially.
Two distinct points of view emerged, Gasparotto writes. But a marked number of respondents -and among Afghan vets it was half -say they aren't sustainable.
As an officer commanding in Kandahar, where he was in charge of 23 Field Squadron, Gasparotto struggled with this himself, and concludes now, as he did on the ground back then, that if a leader, unit or the entire CF is preoccupied with providing care to veterans "the CF will have mortgaged its future as a combat-capable force."
These are useful, timely and thorny questions for a battleweary army to ask itself.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
Good questions all, but a combat engineer and army major, Afghanistan veteran Mark Gasparotto, asks another: Whither the Canadian Forces?
In a thesis written for his master's in defence studies, Gasparotto examines four CF policies and concludes they collectively have served to weaken the army's operational effectiveness and undermine the martial spirit which ought to form the backbone of any fighting army.
All stem from efforts to make up for the shabby pay and treatment Canadian soldiers received in the 1990s (famously called the "decade of darkness" by former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier) and are rooted in high-minded intentions. All are meant to see that soldiers are welltaken care of by a grateful nation. All reflect the army's struggle to reconcile its traditional ideals (that soldiering is a calling, not just another job; that the unit and mission are more important than the individual, etc.) with those of a contemporary and increasingly individualistic society.
Thus the title of Gasparotto's brave paper -No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
The policies are (1) tour length (including a policy that provides a paid trip home from the theatre of war); (2) support to deployed troops (everything from the quality of food, gyms, barber services to availability of web access); (3) bonus "environmental duty allowances" (which pay deployed soldiers, depending on their length of service, anywhere from an extra $300 to $750 a month); and (4) socalled universality of service, which means that soldiers must meet a minimum fitness level, a requirement which is now being waived or bent for injured troops.
Gasparotto uses the results of his survey of senior officers and non-commis-sioned members -127 leaders anonymously completed the survey -to bolster his concerns. Fully 40% agreed or strongly agreed that the CF focus on troops' well-being threatens the primacy of mission success.
In Afghanistan, the standard Canadian tour for most of the duration of the mis-sion was six months, though that has recently been lengthened to eight. Because every soldier had to get home for leave, some were heading back to Canada for their break within a month of arriving, with the result that much of the time, units were at 80% combat effectiveness.
At Kandahar Air Field, where Canadians were based with troops from a dozen other countries, the creature comforts were significant. So accustomed have troops become to such amenities that after Canada's 2010 relief mission to Haiti, for instance, the commander lamented in a post-op brief that the "CF has lost the ability to go in austere."
Some survey respondents commented in particular on what Gasparotto calls "the insatiable appetite" of troops for web access to "remain connected to friends and family no matter where they are in the world or what they are doing on operations."
As one respondent said, "Any suggestion to go without air conditioners, video games and unlimited access to communicate back to Canada is met with anger."
In fact, using the army's own figures, Gasparotto shows that since 2006, "the CF spent an average 3.7 times more on its own infrastructure [in Afghanistan] than what it spent on reconstruction" for locals.
The environmental duty allowances, some respondents argued, have a similar deleterious effect.
Soldiers (and sailors and air crews, too, who receive different but equivalent bonuses; there are more than a dozen different kinds) become accustomed to the extra pay, and when posted to jobs, such as those at the army's own schools, which don't offer the allowances, will try to avoid taking them.
This is also telling of the vocation-versus-profession dilemma: If in order to recruit from a decreasing pool of potential candidates who have their generation's high expectations for personal satisfaction, the CF markets itself as simply another good employer, what is lost?
"The CF must redirect its energy by strengthening the intangible benefits of military service -the very ones that attracted most of its members at the outset to choose a career in the military," Gasparotto says. "It is by focusing on the intangible benefits that the CF can fortify the vocational model of duty . among a new generation of Canadians who want to serve their country."
The emotional universality-of-service issue may pose the single trickiest challenge.
At its simplest, it means that everyone in the army needs to be able to fight as an infantryman and pass a mandatory fitness test. A soldier who can't may stay in uniform on a temporary basis not to exceed three years.
But as troops began returning from Kandahar with grave injuries, both physical and stress-related, and in the face of a widely reported promise from then-boss Hillier that "no soldier wounded in Afghanistan will be released" without his okay, the policy wasn't universally applied, leaving the CF vulnerable to legal challenges from recruits who can't pass the minimum test.
More important, the survey suggests, is that while the vast majority of respondents believe the Canadian government is responsible for providing indefinite care to injured soldiers, and that wounded warriors must get all the help they need, the CF itself must not be allowed to become what one respondent called "an alternate form of welfare."
The survey asked respondents if these policies, adopted since Afghanistan, are sustainable -emotionally, operationally and materially.
Two distinct points of view emerged, Gasparotto writes. But a marked number of respondents -and among Afghan vets it was half -say they aren't sustainable.
As an officer commanding in Kandahar, where he was in charge of 23 Field Squadron, Gasparotto struggled with this himself, and concludes now, as he did on the ground back then, that if a leader, unit or the entire CF is preoccupied with providing care to veterans "the CF will have mortgaged its future as a combat-capable force."
These are useful, timely and thorny questions for a battleweary army to ask itself.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
Conrad Black responds
Truthfully, this man is fascinating. I would love to meet him, but I would have to download some dictionary app for my Blackberry just so I could understand all those big words he uses. He has an interesting - if somewhat bitchy comment in today's National Post - check it out.
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