Tom Mulcair Prepares To Leave?

Listing the highlights of your political career is like picking the tunes for your Greatest Hits album, right?  Its what you do when you are done.  And, weirdly enough, Gary Doer is coming back home.

Coincidence?

Ezra Gets His Date

Ezra Levant

Type: Hearing First Date of Hearing: Feb 29, 2016 Last Date of Hearing: Mar 02, 2016 Date/Status Details: Calgary Hearing Detail:         CO20142249 / HE20150107 It is alleged that you were publicly discourteous or disrespectful to a Commissioner or Tribunal Chair of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and that such conduct is deserving of sanction. It is alleged that your public comments regarding the Alberta Human Rights Commission were inappropriate and unbecoming and that such conduct is deserving of sanction. CO20140632 / HE20150107 It is alleged your public comments regarding the Alberta Human Rights Commission were inappropriate and unbecoming and that such conduct is deserving of sanction.

Some background.  The road to this hearing has been long and winding, passing through Alberta Law Society Appeal Panel.  Their decision was pretty damning:

Bit more background here.  FWIW, the law society website now has Ezra's status as "non-practicing".  Given how often he screws up, you'd  think he would want as much practice as he could get.  He's obviously not very good with this law talking thing.

A Modest Proposal: A Trudeau Government Should Restore Section 13 Of The Canadian Human Rights Act

That's the hate speech provision, which I've written about it at numerous occasions in the past.  The CPC ditched it after a years long smear campaign engineered by white supremacists, Ezra Levant, various scribblers in the press, and a few easily gulled artsy farts.  But the point is--and this should be obvious when you considered the ill-favoured crowd that pushed it--the repeal was never popular. The deed was accomplished via a private member's bill in the dead of night and pundits who had howled for repeal for years suddenly found something else to ruminate over.  And while we may argue over the philosophical underpinnings of any hate-speech law, its worth noting that the concrete misdeeds ascribed to various government agencies in enforcing S13 were fabrications. Furthermore, some of the real weaknesses in the Human Rights Commision/Tribunal system pointed out during the ongoing debate (the possibility of forum shopping among federal and provincial bodies) were fixed at the adiministrative level by the bodies themselves.  So these issues will not likely come up again.

The CPC just ran one of the ugliest campaigns in living memory, and the repeal of S13 gave them a little more rhetorical space to propogate their various hate messages during this campaign.  I would love to watch them try to frame their opposition to a reinstatement; however, I suspect those of those left will cave out of pure embarrassment.  And I would love to watch the punditorcracy shit themselves in blind fury.  Remember, all they've got now are philosophical arguments against, and a few obviously self-serving economic ones like "If we have to live up to standards, we won't be able to publish as much."

Fun times ahead, hopefully.

Federal Election: Thanksgiving Dinner Edition

At the in-laws last evening, dinner never really deteriorated into a discussion of federal politics. However, it appears that the choices have been whittled down to CPC vs. LPC, with the NDP falling out of the equation. They're all longtime liberal-leaners, so I suspect when the final decisions are made it will go that way.  More interesting is the fact that one of father in-law's McDonald's friends says he'll bring PCPO leader Patrick Brown down to a local McDs one day for a chat.  I've put in a call to the Premier's office, to see if Kathleen is willing to come around and clean father in-law's eaves-troughs.  Or at least send around a minister or two to rake his back yard.  You gotta work for folks, or they'll turn on you.

Why Is Kathleen Wynne Running So Hard For LPC?

Because the Ontario Pension Plan is dead otherwise.  Harper has already said he won't cooperate. That means Ontario can't piggy-back everything onto the CPC, then pay the feds a cut to use their infrastructure and manage the money.  Ontario would have to start from scratch, to build a whole parallel bureaucracy.  Expensive and inefficient.  Wynne's most significant campaign commitment depends on a Liberal government taking power in Ottawa.