Although we often think of those outside our borders as the enemy, the insurgents in Afghanistan who plant IED’s in the hopes of killing our soldiers, or the foreign jihadis who fight a religious war against the west, some of the most effective enemies exist right here within our borders. These people refer to themselves as anti-war activists, or anti-racists, or social justice activists; but really their goals are all very similar. They are people like Naomi Klein, socialist anarchists who use any means necessary to undermine our success as a nation, and the prominence of western civilization’s accomplishments.

Harsha Walia, one of these “feminist, anti racist, migrant justice, Palestine solidarity, Indigenous self-determination, anti capitalist, anti poverty” activists, penned a piece about Remembrance Day in the Vancouver Sun. Only it wasn’t about Remembrance Day, which she writes is symbolic of those who are “most eager to create a steady flow of the dead to remember”, but about all of the other days of the year that should be memorialized for those who have suffered and died due to human and corporate greed, our military wars and occupations, our man-made poverty and, let us not forget, that ubiquitous environmental devastation.

Indeed, according to Ms.Walia, Remembrance Day and war memorials in general, tend to be sites of political and national mobilization, designed to manipulate you, the hapless patriotic Canadian, to conceptualize past memories of warfare and our war dead, in order to direct current wars and future military conflicts. Do you understand that logic? When you bestow a wreath at the grave of your fallen grandfather, you are enabling and perpetuating the western military-industrial complex, something which is anathema to the modern pseudo-leftwing movement and their self-despising existence within our borders.

Ironically, of course, it was the left who once saw fit to rise up against fascism in Europe in the twenties and thirties; leftists who went to Spain to fight in the Civil War. It was the left who saw the importance of an alliance with the military powers of the west, and the corporate assembly plants that provided a mechanized Army to fight the Nazis. When faced with the peril of annihilation by fascism, the socialists rallied the working class toward supporting our government and our troops in that battle against the enemy.

Today’s so-called leftists, however, have never faced the peril of an enemy that threatens the planet. So comfortable are they within the free societies created by the men and women and fought and died for their luxurious existence, that they take the one day that we spare to give honour to them, and manipulate it into some kind of odious political revolt against our “militaristic” leadership.

Ms.Walia’s objection to our flag-waving, respect for the uniforms, our traditional military songs, and patriotic tributes to our fallen soldiers, is to me a sign of a subculture that is rotting our society from the inside out. Paradoxically rejecting the very things which allow them to stand free men and women and criticize our civilization for having the wherewithal to fight and vanquish the Nazi enemy. These modern revisionists, who cast our soldiers today as villains in the international game of neocolonialism:

But again this is not about Remembrance Day. Today, I am haunted by the faces of those who are being slaughtered and murdered by ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan. The day after Remembrance Day, after we underscore the seemingly unique sacrifice of veterans and selectively grieve for them, where is the indignation and sorrow for the daily dead of Afghanistan? Where is our recognition – let alone remembrance – of the soaring number of deaths in a country where, just in the past six months alone, over 2000 people have been killed. According to figures by the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, civilian death in Afghanistan have soared by 24% during the first half of 2009 compared with same period last year.

The rhetoric of the above paragraph is chilling in it’s choice of words. Our soldiers in Afghanistan are “slaughtering” and “murdering” Afghans. Why, we’re little more than an extension of the white Christian Armies sent forth to continue our Crusade against jihad, in the words of Elizabeth May, modern conquistadors against the enemies of Jesus Christ.

Why Ms.Walia even takes an opportunity to snipe at former Afghani MP Malalai Joya, considered the bravest woman in Afghanistan, by characterizing her resistance against the misogynistic murderous Taliban as validating the “perpetuating policies of death, violence, and destruction?” Truly, the modern feminist movement has allied itself with some very strange bedfellows when it considers the Taliban an acceptable compromise to the “racist” civilizations which occupy Afghanistan.

We are “narcissists” for remembering our fallen war dead. We are “self-righteous freedom-lovers and democracy-promoters” for asking people like Ms.Walia to take one day to respect, with sincerity, those who gave their lives because they truly believed it had to be done to guarantee our future as a nation. Alas, all she can dwell on are our “murderous” soldiers in Afghanistan and how we interned the Japanese during the second world war.

As though it weren’t ridiculous enough, she finishes by condemning our nation as one that is based on the illegal expropriation of indigenous lands. One can scarcely be blamed for wondering whether Ms.Walia did not realize she resides in this occupied territory, and whether she intends to leave all of us Christian Crusader racists to go and live in a setting more comfortable to her notions of social justice. Saudi Arabia perhaps?

What do they teach kids in school these days? This is the face of the modern leftwing movement, and this is their ideology in a nutshell. This utterly paradoxical anarchic rejection of everything this country stands for, or has stood for, in the entirety of it’s history, including it’s very existence. The enemy exists within. And given their proximity to us, I’d say they’re more dangerous than the radicals we fight 10,000 kilometres away.

Photograph: B.C. Ferries handout, via Vancouver Sun

The provincial government is drowning in debt, and some of the biggest losses are coming from their publicly owned transportation companies, Translink and B.C. Ferries. According to B.C.’s comptroller Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland in her audit of B.C. Ferries, executives are paid far too much and run the company without any public consultation or accountability.

In the report that was released last week, it offers recommendations to the province to reign in B.C. Ferries. She also advised that the government create a new oversight body for B.C. Ferries and TransLink in order to facilitate better public consultation.

B.C. Ferries’ C.E.O. and President David Hahn received $1 million in salary and bonuses in 2008, which is much higher than executives at other crown corporations. But Mr.Hahn rejected the reports recommendations, saying that B.C. Ferries is a private organization, not a public sector one. But that’s not entirely accurate.

It’s true that B.C. Ferries is organized as a privately held company, but operates with the provincial Crown as sole shareholder. Mr.Hahn has warned that any regulation to the company would mean even higher administrative costs.

But Maureen Bader of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation says that “B.C. Ferries is still a government monopoly and still gets millions of taxpayer’s dollars every year to operate, but appears to be accountable to no one.” She agrees that the last thing we need is more bureaucratic oversight to add to the current problems with the system, but says that executive pay should be comparable to other public sector companies, and not private ones as it currently is:

So what requires much more scrutiny is just how the salary was arrived at. The behaviour of the members of the Ferry Authority needs a more thorough investigation. The Ferry Authority acts as the sole shareholder of BC Ferries and is supposed to appoint the Board members and set Board and executive salaries. What did the Authority do? It appointed itself to the Board then gave itself and the Ferries executives big pay increases. It took a Comptroller General’s report to reveal this because it would appear that politicians are not minding the store.

The fact is that B.C. Ferries may want to pretend it’s a private company with the ability to set it’s own exorbitant executive pay, but it’s a government-controlled monopoly in the transportation network.

And then there’s TransLink, and the new money-losing Canada Line that links Richmond, and hence the Olympic Games, with Vancouver. The Vancouver Province reported on Thursday that the Canada Line will lose $14-million to $20-million every year until 2025 under the current fare structure and expected attendance rates. The worst part of this is that the Canada Line seems to have been built exclusively for the Olympics, since the Evergreen line is by far the greater priority.

The Canada Line, which caused chaos on Cambie street’s commercial district, wasn’t really deemed a necessary priority for Lower Mainland residents. The far greater importance was getting the Evergreen skytrain line out to the suburbs of Port Moody, Port Coquitlam and Coquitlam, which still rely only on the West Coast Express in order to make expensive trips in to Vancouver every day. People who have been forced out of Vancouver by skyrocketing housing prices now have to rely on a gridlocked highway, or an expensive bus service in order to get to work.

Ms.Wenezenki-Yolland found that fares from transit riders make up just half of what the transit actually costs to run, which will only get worse with the Olympic Canada Line. Another problem is that TransLink continues to expand without calculating ridership demand.

And just like B.C. Ferries, TransLink is crushed under the weight of it’s corporate executives. Administrative costs for the crown corporation rose 101% from 2002 to 2008, or 7 times greater than the inflation rate, as Michael Smyth writes in the Province. That means a structural deficit of $130 million a year, assisted in large part by the Canada Line and the executive payouts.

As the Liberals struggle to balance their massive budget deficit in the coming years, their public transportation corporations will need to be scrutinized as one of greatest areas to make cost-effective cuts. Unfortunately for Gordon Campbell, his carbon tax and other ridiculous environment regulations like AirCare, will make returning to the car a paradoxical solution.

I missed last week’s poll tracker because both Eric and I were unavailable, so that means that today’s poll tracker contains two weeks of information. There were three polls since my last update, but two of those were from Ekos Research’s own weekly poll, and one from Nanos with one of their typical small sample polls.

Although the Conservatives have dropped slightly below a 10-point lead over the Liberals, it’s clear that the Liberal party is falling apart in the wake of the exodus of Michael Ignatieff’s personal aides and advisers. And then there’s the unclear future fight with Denis Coderre, who has announced his intent for a leadership putsch of sorts. This is the sixth week in a row that the Conservative Party has enjoyed a 10-point lead over their rivals, and all polling companies have shown that the pendulum seems to have swung over to team Blue for a long-term basis. The recent federal by-elections which handed the Conservatives two more seats, is also indicative of the failings of the Liberal Party.

Ekos released two polls recently, one which shows the current polling, and one which shows the seat projection were a federal election held today. In both cases the results show that a year after the election of 2008, the political scene is as stalemated as it was then, almost down to the decimal point. But while the Conservatives can probably feel satisfied with maintaining their lead over one full year, the Liberals have got to be disappointed that the “anointed one” could not lead his party beyond the futility of Stephane Dion and his Green Shift.

Having said that, it has got to be somewhat frustrating for the Conservatives that they continue to be held back from an elusive majority mandate. The youth vote continues to hold back the party, with only 1 in 4 youth Canadians interested in voting for them.

Nik Nanos shows a ten-point lead for the Conservatives as well, in one of their typical polls of 1,000 random Canadians. The most important factor in this poll is that Stephen Harper continues to lead Michael Ignatieff in preference for Prime Minister, this time by a 17-point margin. Nevertheless as the poll concludes, forcing an election right now probably would not be in the best interests of anybody, so the Conservatives cannot capitalize on the weakness of Ignatieff’s party.

Saturday, November 14, 2009:

Ekos History:
CPC 36.6 [-0.8]
LIB 26.6 [-0.2]
NDP 16.8 [+0.5]
GRN 11.2 [+1.2]
BLQ 8.8 [-0.6]

Nanos History:
CPC 38 [-1.8]
LIB 28.8 [-1.2]
NDP 17.9 [+1.3]
GRN 5.9 [+1.3]
BLQ 9.4 [+0.5]

Photographer: Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

The Liberals are continuing to fight the Conservatives by using the same, tired, worn out strategy that has, for the past four years, failed so miserably that the political party is on the precipice of irrelevance. By trying to link the Conservative Party to the far right, by thumping on their hidden agenda rhetoric, they drive voters away en masse, rather than engage them in issues important to Canadians.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff was in New Brunswick on Friday for a convention to rally supporters. Instead what he did was reveal how very out of touch he is with what actually motivates Canadians. Mr.Ignatieff spoke about climate change:

Ignatieff said U.S. President Barack Obama is spending six times more per capita on clean energy than Canada.

The Conservatives are spending less per capita on renewable energy than Alaska, he said.

“You know who comes from Alaska, don’t you,” said Igantieff, drawing a laugh. “So when it comes to clean energy, Stephen Harper isn’t just behind Barack Obama, he’s behind Sarah Palin.”

Yes, of course. It’s the smear by association game, played to the laughs of the Sarah Palin pinata that liberals love to bash. It’s meant to imply that Stephen Harper is such a knuckle-dragging neo-conservative, that he’s out-rednecking the Queen redneck herself. And by implying that Mr.Harper is beneath even the much-loathed Sarah Palin, Mr.Ignatieff is doing precisely what he claims he doesn’t want to do: attack Stephen Harper as a person.

Brain power and intellectual property, not natural resources, will drive the new world, Mr.Ignatieff said to the crowd. Is that something that really makes any sense? In the same speech that he derides Stephen Harper, openly mocking him with a comparison to Sarah Palin, he touts his own intellectual prowess? It is almost as though the Liberal leader is writing his own attack ads against him. One of the most odious aspects of the man is his pervasive aura of arrogance and elitism, which drives most Canadians away like fingernails on a blackboard. Even political neophyte Justin Trudeau seems to have the common sense to choose his political allies with greater caution.

Can Mr.Ignatieff’s statement even be worthy of examination? Far from the image that the Liberals have tried to paint the Prime Minister, this is a man who does believe in creating climate change agreements, much to the chagrin of many of his supporters. The international community must work together on a climate-change deal to “reduce the risk to the planet,” Mr.Harper said today. But he has been adamant that the developed nations will not unilaterally act without an international agreement which binds both developed and emerging economies. It’s something that has been a non-starter for Mr.Harper since the Kyoto Protocol.

Who could be guiding Mr.Ignatieff to this exiguous stance on the political abyss? The leader has lost former chief of staff Ian Davey; former communications director Jill Fairbrother; two more senior aides, Alexis Levine and Mark Sakamoto, announced they were also returning to Toronto. Iffy’s inner circle is slowly crumbling in plain sight, even as the party threatens to fall into a deep rift as the opportunistic Denis Coderre sticks his nose back into the fray.

There was speculation recently that Warren Kinsella had been booted from Mr.Ignatieff’s war room. As Ezra Levant writes, Mr.Kinsella’s “tactics were the pushiest thing in Ignatieff’s rudderless office, and so they dominated by default”. But these tactics, or rather more accurately, gimmicks, have made for a poor strategy. The constant prodding for an election has left Warren Kinsella’s man in front looking weaker and weaker by the day.

But only Warren Kinsella could continue to orchestrate this level of political incompetence, and is likely also the inspiration for the Sarah Palin remark in New Brunswick. His year-end predictions from 2008 have proven to be so unbelievably wrong, that the only reason one might be able to conceive why he hasn’t been fired yet is that he’s working for the Liberals for free. But even free help should be recognized for the liability that it is as a certain point.

All of Michael Ignatieff’s other aides have left or are on their way out. The last man standing with the Liberal leader is a person for whom no level of hubristic rhetoric is too much as he continues to bring public embarrassment and scorn to the OLO.

In April, when President Barack Obama bowed to Saudi King Abdullah, he received much condemnation from both Americans and people around the world. While President Obama may have desired to produce a sign of respect, bowing before a monarch is usually a symbol of submission to his power. Now he’s gone and done it again, this time with Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.

As noted in American Digest, this will probably lead to the inevitable thousand photoshops.

And in the video, he doesn’t just bow once; rather he bobs his head like a veritable American pigeon.

Some of the wisecracks:

“May I shine your shoes, Sir?”
“I’m surprised he didn’t curtsy.”
“See, Obama is not a Muslim. He’s a shintoist.”

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

There has been much made of the Fort Hood massacre and possible links to Islamist terrorism. Many of the most prominent critics of radical Islam have written about the incident at length. Tarek Fatah wrote that one cannot ignore the attire worn by suspect Major Nidal Hasan on the morning of the killings. He was wearing the “shalwar-kameez,” the traditional attire worn by Pashtuns on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border, and symbolizes the jihad waged by al-Qaeda and the Taliban against the foreign invaders.

Irshad Manji wrote that the distinction of motive helps to shed a light on whether religion plays a factor in the crime. If a criminal merely happens to be a Muslim, his religion is immaterial. But if the crime is committed in the name of Islam, then that religion can certainly come under scrutiny as the underlying motivator.

But it is Salim Mansur who makes the greatest stretch that this shooting was a collective act “in the war Islamists declared some three decades ago against America”, and the west in general. He argues that the point in his life that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born citizen of Palestinian immigrants, became in his mind a loyal soldier of the global Islamist jihad, is highly relevant in determining what happened in Fort Hood.

What I’m having trouble with is in brushing this incident as broadly as Mr.Mansur does, using rhetorically alarming phrases such as “Nidal Hasan went out as an Islamist warrior to kill as many infidels before he found his martyrdom”, because it presupposes that an act perpetrated by a person acting alone is representative of the collective actions of jihadists. This distinction matters because, if Mr.Hasan acted alone and without orders from a terrorist network, then it becomes more difficult to simply lob him into the pile of terrorists who seek to destroy America.

It isn’t “political correctness” that tempers my caution; rather it is my hesitation to attribute the wanton actions of one individual to the madness of the Islamist terrorists. If not only because, as in actions performed by the military against our enemies, orders do matter, but because we run the risk of creating terrorism out of criminality. For an example of this, one can merely look at how mass murderer Marc Lepine has been rebranded under his Algerian birth name of Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi, presumably to create an insidious implication that Muslims have a tendency to go postal.

There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest that Mr.Hasan was motivated by radical Islam in the execution of his crimes. He shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he shot up a room full of American soldiers. It is alleged he was in communication with a Yemen-based jihadist. He owned a paper shredder in his apartment, which although not quite uncommon, isn’t exactly common either. And then there’s the alleged Pakistan connection, although for now that is based on hearsay from Congressman Michael McCaul.

George Jonas in the National Post chides Barack Obama for urging caution:

“‘I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we get all the facts,’ Obama said.”

Look before you leap is good advice — though perhaps shouting Allahu Akbar does offer “a little hint of the actual motive,” as the Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren put it. But journalists such as Warren who feel that a massacre in the hand is worth two witch hunts in the bush are rare birds. A favourite topic of the mainstream press these days is whether Maj. Hasan is a madman or a terrorist. Many in the media seem to believe the two are mutually exclusive.

While it does offer a “little hint” of the motive, it doesn’t constitute the act of Islamist terrorism unless it was ordered from a centralized command. It’s the same difference between an Afghan peasant shooting at an ISAF soldier in his village, and a conscripted foreign jihadist being ordered to set an IED on the road before a convoy approaches. Whether he was a madman or a terrorist can be determined by whether he acted alone or not. A man screaming about Jesus Christ before he shoots a crowd of people is no more representative of Christian terrorism than a man screaming about Allah before shooting soldiers in Fort Hood being representative of Islamist terrorism.

After 12 straight days of work, I think I deserve a little break. Or perhaps more appropriately, a little foray into the imagination as aided by these beautiful pictures.

1. The Path

2. Prohodna cave, Karlukovo, Bulgaria

3. Untitled

4. Wengen, Switzerland. Photographer: C.Spracklen

5. The garden of morning calm. Photographer: Elena Razdolina

6. Untitled

7. Starnberger See, Upper Bayern

8. Quebec fall foliage

Haven’t had enough of incredible photographs yet? Check out:

Photographer Collection: David Guttenfelder in Afghanistan

After watching the interview, you can read the story from any number of news sources about how this degenerate tried to steal $10,000 from world war two veterans.

While the story ended well, and the robber was thwarted, it could very well have ended tragically:

Asked why he reacted the way he did, Dietsch, who served with the Navy in the North Atlantic in the Second World War protecting convoys, said: “Because of the time we served in the military, and the fact we’d been out all last week collecting money with the poppies that made me think, ‘You’re not getting away with this.’”

The money goes to support veterans, but also worthy community programs and institutions.

However, “In retrospect, the more I think of it, I was stupid,” Dietsch said, who added he’s more frightened now than he was at the time of the robbery.

A hero at time of war, and now a hero in time of peace. As for the robber, let’s hope they find him, and let’s hope he also “falls down a flight of stairs accidentally” on the way to the police station.

An article by Joel Connelly in the Seattle Post Intelligencer indicates that because of a lack of governmental marketing, the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver is unlikely to add the 12,000 jobs that Premier Gordon Campbell once predicted. A new independent study by Price Waterhouse Coopers accounting firm, commissioned by the province and federal government, reveals that no more 100 jobs, and as few as 25, have been created.

That may be somewhat unsurprising news coming during an economic downturn which has shed jobs from forestry and construction in the province. But it certainly sheds light on the perception that the Olympics have been the impetus for the boom in B.C., something that should be put to bed by this study:

The study looked at tourism from 2003 to 2008. It does not present a flattering picture of benefits trickling down from the upcoming Games.

“The 2010 Winter Games have not had a measurable impact on tourism’s gross domestic product and share of the economy,” it found. On the whole, “tourism impacts did not materialize,” it added, itemizing the lack of forecast results.

Visits to “Beautiful British Columbia” from within Canada have increased but “the 2010 Winter Games cannot be held responsible,” the study concluded.

It’s important to note that the study doesn’t measure the impact, obviously, that is yet to be felt when the visitors do begin arriving in late January and early February. But what it does measure is the truthfulness to the myth that the Olympic Games function as a means of promoting a locale for tourism; in this case, that myth has been debunked by information that the total number of international inbound travellers to Canada declined 22 percent in the years since the Olympics were announced to be held in Vancouver.

The biggest problem, it would appear, is the lack of coordination in tourism marketing from the province, as well as the fact that the IOC has blocked attempts to promote Vancouver’s Olympic Games during the build-up to the 2008 Beijing Games, as noted by Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer.

So now that we know the pre-Olympic boom expectations have been a bust, we await to see what the post-Olympic expectations will deliver. Here’s hoping it creates more than 25 jobs.

Ontario’s new vanity government-issued licence plates that are designed with the yellow ribbon signifying support for our military, does not actually do a whole lot of supporting. Progressive Conservative MPP Bob Runciman is critical of the new plates because a very small portion of sales go to the Canadian Forces Personnel Assistance Fund. The plates, which were unveiled yesterday on Remembrance Day, will be issued in February. But while each plate will cost $77.25 to purchase, only $2.25 will go to the Assistance Fund, or just under 3% of the proceeds:

A set of personalized plates with the yellow ribbon will cost $314, with $4.50 going toward the fund.

Runciman said it is “misleading” for the government to pass this initiative off as a “significant” way for the public to raise funds for the Canadian Forces.

“The cost to produce the plates are pretty modest,” he said. “This could’ve been a potentially significant way to raise money for the military and their families.”

But Government Services Minister Harinder Takhar said the plates were never meant to be a fundraising method for military families.

“The purpose is not about fundraising. It’s meant to create awareness about our defence forces and the kind of job our defence forces do,” he said.

I beg to differ. I think a great number of people would assume that the plates would go toward supporting our military in more than just “awareness”. Indeed, this sounds more like a mere copyright licencing opportunity for the province of Ontario, paying into the military fund for the right to use the logo in the same way they would pay the Toronto Maple Leafs for the rights to theirs.

The matching plates are discounted even more, with just 1.4% of sales proceeds going into the Canadian Forces Personnel Assistance Fund. It’s one thing to say you’re creating licence plates with the yellow ribbon on it in order to create awareness about our military, but without explicitly explaining that the plates only donate certain portions of the proceeds to the military, it is misleading.

In fairness to the government of Ontario, the “vanity plates” are the same cost as other “Personalized, Graphic and
Sample Plates” on their website. A regular 2 to 6 character plates with a graphic [like the yellow ribbon or some other logo] will run you $314. Without knowing exactly how much the government pays in licencing to other registered trademarks and logos, it’s difficult to know whether they’re being generous or cheap.

“There’s a lot of costs involved in these plates, designing the plates, IT costs, distribution costs . . . we have to take all those costs into account. We’d like to give them as much as we can, but our intention is to create awareness and support,” said Mr. Takhar.

Knowing what all those costs are, broken down into the cost effectiveness of the service, would go a long way to helping Mr.Takhar’s statement. But given that the announcement was made on Remembrance Day, one is left with the sense that this is a mere marketing ploy that has really very little to do with honouring our veterans, and our soldiers.