Trudeaupia

And in Quebec more and more students are enrolling in private schools - again this year private school enrollment is up and public school enrollment is down. One can understand why teachers' unions might consider this a bad thing, but teachers should welcome the fact that choice for students yields employment choices for teachers, too. In fact, Quebec's current system (while short of a full voucher model) is a model others could learn from:

the study, authored by William Robson and Claudia R. Hepburn and entitled Learning from Success: What Americans Can Learn from School Choice in Canada, found that:

-- International comparisons show that Canadian provinces that provide public funding to private schools tend to have both higher average achievement scores and better scores for less advantaged students, suggesting that such funding enhances quality. Basically, test scores are higher in areas where parents enjoy a wide variety of school choices;

-- In provinces that provide public funding for private schools, children from low-income families attend private schools in greater numbers and form a higher percentage of total private school enrollment than they do in provinces that do not fund private schools. Simply put, lower-income families take advantage of school choice and send their children to private schools more often when those schools are publicly funded;

-- Publicly subsidized private schools can be accountable to government and still maintain their independence and distinctiveness;

-- The recent Rand study on school choice, which concluded that all the evidence for vouchers comes from relatively small-scale programs, woefully neglected to consider the large-scale school choice programs that exist in Canada.

Quotes

"This study goes a long way towards debunking the age-old theory that school choice does not help low-income children," said Friedman Foundation President Gordon St. Angelo. "Unfortunately, here in the U.S., we continue to allow the educational bureaucracy to deny low-income families school choice, and hence the opportunity to succeed in school and in life."

"This study shows that school choice is not some radical, new educational concept, but one that has been widely used for generations by America's closest neighbor," says Claudia R. Hepburn, co-author of the study and Director of Education Policy at the Fraser Institute. "Canadian provinces that have long provided public funding to independent schools have higher academic achievement, especially for low-income students, than those that do not."

Yes it certainly does. Yes, it's true, there is one area where Quebec is not the statist, socialist laggard and it's a model other provinces and states should consider.

Here's an interesting editorial in the Jerusalem Post:

Just as the people of France are uniting against the kidnappers, France must unite with the United States (and Israel) against the Islamist threat. France must decide what is more important, asserting its independence from the US, or jointly harnessing the West's tremendous economic and military power to drive all terror-supporting states, particularly Iran and Syria, into compliance with international law.

Nothing unexpected, really, but it dawned on me that we have Israel and the Prime Minister of Iraq essentially giving the French the same blunt advice.

Anyone freaking out over barely detectable trace levels of pesticide residue found in food probably have no idea what's naturally found in our food:

the US Food and Drug Administration defined "levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans".

The list on its website is disarmingly explicit.

Maggots, for example, present "no health hazard" as long as they average less than one maggot in every 250ml of orange juice, two in every 100g of tomato juice or 20 in every 100g of mushrooms.

Rodent hairs are allowed at the rate of up to one in every 100g of peanut butter, one in every 450g of popcorn or 4.5 hairs in every 225g of macaroni or noodles.

Wheat can contain up to 9mg of rodent droppings in every 450g of grain.

There's simply no such thing as perfectly pure food. Get over it.

Interesting interview with the Iraqi Prime Minister in Le Monde:

Ce qui est arrivé au journaliste italien, ce qui arrive en ce moment aux Français, ainsi qu'à ceux qui, comme la France, se sont opposés à la "guerre contre le terrorisme", montre que personne ne sera épargné. Le terrorisme ne connaît aucune limite. Eviter la confrontation n'est pas une réponse.

Attempting to avoid the confrontation is not a response. After attacks on naval personel in Pakistan, an attack on their tanker the Limburg and now a hostage-taking of sympathetic French journalists in Iraq the message seems to finally being received in France. We should pay attention to this message in Canada, too.

The Iraqi Prime Minister is certainly blunt:

Un jour, les Etats-Unis ont décidé de débarquer en Normandie, pour éliminer Hitler. Ils ont essuyé de lourdes pertes pour accomplir cet objectif. Il se produit la même chose aujourd'hui. Les peuples doivent prendre leurs responsabilités. La décision d'aider l'Irak était courageuse. Laissez-moi vous dire que les Français, malgré tout le bruit qu'ils font - "Nous ne voulons pas la guerre !" -, auront bientôt à combattre les terroristes.

Whatever the shortcomings of the Bush presidency, and I could name many myself, he does come through in little ways that remind you things could always be worse:

President Bush on Thursday ordered Cabinet agencies to pay more attention to private landowners, states and local governments on how to manage the environment. [....]
It also requires that government "takes appropriate account of and respects the interests of persons with ownership or other legally recognized interests in land and other natural resources."

The creepy growth of institutions that try to tell you what to do on your own property is one of the most insidious threats to freedom and prosperity, not to mention a threat to the environment, too. Notwithstanding the howling protests of the loony left, almost all of the worst environmental catastrophes the world over have been created by governments, not private individuals or corporations. People don't usually need to be told to not defile their own property.

Unfortunately, Canada has a way of copying the worst of Europe's silliness. Let's hope this is one idea we skip:

Judges are to be given tough powers to protect Britain from pollution and over-development under propoosals for a new environmental court.

The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has commissioned two reports which back the creation of a dedicated court ...

Just what we need, green supremes stuffed with enviro-wackos empowered to "interpret" laws.

Given the latest outbreak of stupidity from Carolyn Parrish one almost forgets the last outbreak of stupidity. A number of people have pointed out that the only difference between Parrish and the others in the loony left anti-American wing of the Liberal Party that make up about a third of the caucus is that she’s dense enough to keep saying what they’re all thinking out loud. So let’s recycle the previous outbreak of stupidity indiscretion from Parrish:

We owe the ethnic community some recognition for what they did to save our lives, and it's due them anyway.

This is an exact mirror image of Jacques Parizeau’s infamous blaming of the ethnic vote for a referendum defeat, except that rather than blame she’s pointing out that the Liberals are deeply in their debt and the Liberals had better deliver the booty on what’s owed. It is a little strange that this little tidbit hasn’t garnered 1% of the attention Parizeau got, given the normal hypersensitivity of the media in matters ethnic.

The Liberals are not exactly restrained in doling out what’s requested as long as it appeases a reliable voting block. So us critics can probably breath easy as there is not yet, as far as I know, a colony of Onabasulu homosexual cannibals relocated from the southern highlands of Papau New Guinea to a critical Liberal riding. I was not able to make it to Bremen to listen to his no doubt fascinating lecture on their rituals and selected aspects of the Onabasulu way of life, which the professor tells us includes institutionalized homosexuality and exo-cannibalism. But if there were such a colony we also might want to have asked our new Supremes their thoughts on how this particular segment of society would fit into the Liberal multicultural tapestry and the revealed Liberal plan to reward their loyal ethnics. As Rosalie Abella has said:

"We need to understand that "equality" does not necessarily mean treating people the same... Sometimes equality means treating people the same, despite their differences, and sometimes it means treating them as equals by accommodating their differences."

Ah yes, differences. Some cultures just wouldn’t have their same authenticity if we didn’t go out of our way to accommodate their differences. Perhaps if the Liberals finally invite conservative Christians to dinner at their next multicultural roundtable you might want to check if their strategists have uncovered an Onabasulu voting block that needs “accommodating” before accepting.

But even Abella and the Liberals would probably reluctantly conclude that a Christian’s desire to not be put in a pot and served for dinner would trump the traditional practices of the Onabasulu. Probably. Though they have to think pretty hard depending on how many hypothetical urban ridings the Onabasulu could swing for them. But setting aside such extreme cases, we really have no idea to what extent someone like Abella would be prepared to twist the law to “accommodate differences”. It sure would be nice to have a screening process that would at least give us some idea, since we’ll be stuck with her until 2021. By that time who knows what sort of interesting cultural additions the Liberals will have woven into our multicultural fabric. They may even open immigration centers in the Papau New Guinea southern highlands.

Think you had a bad day or a shitty job? Spare a thought for these three:

Three people are dead and one person is in critical condition after falling into a septic tank at a campground early Saturday morning.

Around midnight, the 56-year-old owner of the Lac du Repos campground entered a hole in the ground with his son-in-law, 27, in order to clear a blocked drain, said Quebec provincial police.

However, the owner and his son-in-law were overcome by fumes and fell 4 metres into the septic tank below.

Personally, I think Greg was there and is just reporting what he saw but cleverly tries to pass it off as satire:

..The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Bush was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Ideological purity. All subsequent crimes against the Ideology, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching…

No doubt the folks from CBC headquarters in Toronto get together with their comrades at the Star to join in on the fun.

Shannon Davis has such a pretty pink blog layout, don't you think? And with that to demonstrate her feminine bona fides she is certainly entitled to skewer such things as flaming leftist feminists on the Supreme Court and the Liberal Women's Caucus. And so she does:

One final thought: Rosalie Abella?!?!

Help me contain my excitement, on behalf of women everywhere (because we all agree on everything, you know), over the fact that we will now have four women on the SCC.

Now, if only we could do something about the over-representation of left-wing nuts.

Well, Rosalie is the Quota Queen herself, so maybe her first act on the Supreme Court will be to decide there are far too many judges who are incapable of distinguishing between the plain language of the law and fashionable leftist causes.

But I figure anyone who advocates promoting Conservative causes with babes in bikinis belongs on the blogroll.

Perhaps they plan on rounding up Carolyn Parrish and 5,000 of her most annoying loudmouth fellow travellers to airdrop onto a battlefield (using American air transport, naturally). If that's what they have in mind I'm all for it.

But if you actually want a serious opinion on their hair-brained plans check out this discussion and a must-read rant by Chris Taylor on the topic:

Peacekeeping is inserting our own warfighting troops in between the warring parties, on the understanding that if those troops are intentionally harmed by either side we will retaliate with lethal force of our own. While they are there, they may medically treat civilian populations and begin reconstruction. But their job is to prevent war -- by sabre-rattling of sorts -- keeping the combatant parties apart, and implying that the peacekeeping troops have the capability and the political direction to fight back lethally if they are harmed. This is why peacekeeping is a task always delegated to soldiers, rather than neighborhood school crossing guards.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

So maybe we can still recruit Mark Steyn, just not as a family values candidate:

I wouldn't stand for Parliament on a family values platform because I know someone's bound to bring up the 123 gay porn movies I had a bit part in back in Amsterdam in the 1970s.

Can it be true that the CRTC is backing down on the closure of CHOI-FM?

CHOI-FM will stay on the air until March of next year, well after its licence expires at the end of this month.

The controversial radio station has reached an agreement with the CRTC to keep broadcasting until a final decision comes down about the fate of the station.

In a letter sent by the CRTC to the federal court of appeals, the broadcast regulator says it will not oppose CHOI-FM's request to stay on the air.

Or is this just a delaying action until the protest dies down, then they'll abruptly close it?

I was going to write up rant about how utterly hypocrital it is for the Liberals to talk about fixing the democratic deficit and then appoint the most flaming activist judges imaginable, but why bother? The whole point of this exercise and the sham hearings about the appointment is to put an exclamation point on the fact that what we think doesn't matter. You could build a case that they picked a judge that thinks the constitution and law mean whatever she bloody well considers fashionable leftist thinking among her circle of salon socialists acquaintenances, but to what point. She's the one who skipped right over any niceties about gay marriage and implemented gay divorce, as well has uncovered the secret clause specifying the right to bugger 14 year old boys. Bill Graham is no doubt happy with the choice. But it wouldn't matter a whit.

To get an appreciation for the respect Liberals have for Parliament, conservatives and those who elect them just check out Warren Kinsella's reaction to a Conservative MP being less than enthusiastic about this whole process:

It's this: is it just me, or does anybody else also think this Vic Toews guy is a goof?

I mean, does he actually think he's fooling anybody with his dime-store Clarence Darrow kvetching about process (a process his party agreed to in advance, incidentally)? Doesn't he know that Canadians will look at this, and see that his REAL objections are about putting two extraordinary women on the high court who don't correspond to his own red-necked, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, troglodyte perspective on a modern democratic society?

It is nice to know we are represented by such profound thinkers as Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish:

We are not joining the coalition of the idiots. We are joining the coalition of the wise.

The "idiots" being those who wish to attempt to shoot down missiles from rogue states, the "wise" being those inclined to let them take out cities like Chicago unhindered.

They tortured people in Iraq, they (the Iraqis) have no weapons of mass destruction. Could somebody explain to me whether you think they're idiots or geniuses?

This interview with John O'Neill paints a devastating portrait of Kerry's Vietnam record. If you're not inclined to read their book read that indepth interview for all the lowlights of the Kerry "heroics" in Vietnam. After all the fuss about Bush possibly not showing up for National Guard duty in Alabama it truly is astounding the lengths to which the media are going to ignore these guys with their eyewitness testimony.