the blog quebecois

I was so heartened to see JC's performance in the House of Commons today, with the backbenchers shouting and clapping their fins so hard I feared they might rupture their burkas.

Sounds almost Yiddish, dunnit? "Rupture their burkas."

Oy veh!

In case you were under the misapprehension that Canada Post bureaucrats are asleep at the switch:

The president of Pet Valu Canada, a chain with hundreds of outlets in Ontario and Manitoba, said yesterday that the company has decided to stop carrying Bark Bars after receiving a letter from the legal department of Canada Post.

The dog treats come in flavours such as Parmesan cheese, fish and chips, and garlic and are shaped to represent the age-old prey of dogs – cats and letter carriers.

Via NealeNews

If Tim Blair is the answer, the question isn't worth asking. I had a certain amount of time for him until not that long ago, but no longer. . . .

And although I've indulged momentarily in that sort of nonsense myself (blog bile awards before I got bored by the concept), what I really think is that awards are contrary to the whole spirit of blogging.

This is from a post on Tim Blair's blog a couple of days ago and is a quote from another Australian blogger named Ken Parish, who sounds like a preemptively-sore loser, if you ask me. (When someone says, "It's not about the awards," it's about the awards.) I've taken the liberty of eliding Mr. Parish's remarks, as he tends to use bad words. You can read the original here.

What caught my attention, though, was an update that Tim made to the post:

Why is Hedy Fry posting at Ken's site as Dude?

This will take a bit of explanation for non-Canadian readers. Hedy Fry (webpage here) was a cabinet minister in the Chrétien government (Secretary of State for Status of Women and Multiculturalism -- a politically-correct hack, in other words) who racked up six bumbling years in that position before being demoted to the backbench for one particularly egregious piece of race-baiting in March of 2001. I'll leave it to Herman Goodden of the London Free Press to summarize:

Fry's latest remarks were deliberately planned as an answer to a staged question in Parliament which was lobbed her way by an obedient Liberal backbencher. The point of that exchange was to elicit a sort of summation from our minister of multiculturalism on the state of the nation, bigotry-wise, as the world marked that special and joyous holiday (which, I must admit, I'd never heard of before and haven't bothered flagging for celebration next year) called International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (IDFERD).

Instead of blandly extending "Season's Greetings" or "Happy IDFERD" to Canadians everywhere," Fry donned her very haughtiest demeanour and said:

"Mr. Speaker, we only have to look around the world today at Kosovo, at Macedonia, at Northern Ireland to know that people are still discriminated against in the world because of their race, their religion and their culture. We do not have to go too far. We can just go to British Columbia in Prince George where crosses are being burned on lawns as we speak."

Peppered with questions after that session of Parliament, Fry insisted the mayor of Prince George had sent her a letter requesting her personal help with these demonstrations of racial hatred. Yet Mayor Colin Kinsley of Prince George and that town's RCMP unit denied any such incidents, or that they'd made any overtures to Fry for help.

Interestingly, Fry had made an equally groundless claim four years earlier about cross burnings in Kamloops, has repeatedly claimed that the western provinces are being flooded with Ku Klux Klan-style groups with "a very well organized strategic plan" to establish a "white homeland," and has characterized Canadian history overall as one long litany of "colonial racism and intolerance."

After a couple of weeks of steadily-growing outrage, Chrétien reluctantly dumped her and I hadn't given her another thought until I saw Tim's mention. Following the link he gave, we come to this:

Tim Blair No 1

rant,rant,rant,rant,rant,rant,rant,rant,rant,rant,
rant,rant, pause, rant,rant,rant,

And sure enough, rolling the cursor over "Dude" turns up Fry.H@parl.gc.ca, Fry's Parliamentary email address.

Now of course it could be the case that someone's trying to embarrass Fry; but I doubt she's easily embarrassed. It's funny, too, to think that left to her own devices, all she's capable of is posting incoherent drivel on someone's blog.

Correction:

My memory failed me (but that's what Google's for). I thought Fry was gone from cabinet shortly after that speech, but she lingered on like a bad smell for awhile. Sure enough, she was around to disgrace the country after 9/11:

Peter O'Neil
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, October 02, 2001

OTTAWA -- A B.C. feminist told a cheering audience here that the United
States government is more threatening to the world than international terrorism.

Sunera Thobani received several standing ovations from about 500 delegates attending the Women's Resistance Conference on Monday.

Her comments caused a political uproar, with opposition MPs condemning
Secretary of State Hedy Fry for sitting silently as Thobani spoke. MPs called on
the government to fire Fry, charging that she should have immediately condemned Thobani's statements.

"Today in the world the United States is the most dangerous and the most
powerful global force unleashing horrific levels of violence," said Thobani, a
women's studies professor at the University of British Columbia and former
head of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

Even with this, Fry wasn't canned by the dithering Chrétien until January of 2002.

i knew you were waiting in the street
i heard your feet but could not meet
my lili of the lamplight, my own lili marlene

leip/schultze

Meanwhile, back in EUtopia:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

Via Minority of One

The EU unveils its new counter-terrorist strategy:

The European Commission said it was initiating legal action against 11 states which had failed to incorporate the rules into national noise pollution legislation, which should have been done by July 2004.

The states are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Britain.

Loud = Bad. Bomb = Loud. Therefore Bomb = Bad. Will Mohammed risk the Wrath of the Regulators?

Globe and Mail:

The most frequently televised image of the U.S. Congress is the congressional hearing: senators sitting in judge-like dignity on a dais, interrogating some brilliant or villainous (but always interesting) witness.

The most frequently televised image of the Canadian Parliament is the daily Question Period: opposition members and cabinet ministers adversarially seated two sword lengths apart, hurling insults and retorts in the guise of questions and answers across the floor of the House of Commons.

Our American friends display one of the most attractive features of their elected chamber on TV; we display one of the least attractive features of ours. So what should be done?

Well, watching pompous morons like Barbara Boxer or Henry Waxman in action is not exactly what I'd call attractive; on the other hand, Marlene Jennings is as stupid as any three of 'em put together, so you might have a point.

CBC:

Quebec has been fighting to hang on to the data, but the federal government has refused to agree to the request.

Dutil said Quebec will take the federal government to court once the legislation has been passed and becomes law, but he refused to specify what kind of legal action that would be.

He said if Quebec wins and is able to get the data from the federal registry, a bill would be introduced in the national assembly to create Quebec's own registry.

I guess that things must be pretty flush in Quebec these days if they can justify squandering taxpayers' dollars on already-obsolete (and none-too-accurate in the first place) data. If they want to clutch that tar-baby of a useless bureaucracy then I suppose that there's no stopping them. Nice that they've got the money to spare -- Alberta can celebrate too, by deducting the costs from their transfer payments.