Assorted Links: March 17, 2007

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Now in Portuguese

As well as twenty languages other than English and French.  Multiculturalism reaches its apotheosis. 

Explore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Constitution in this unique interactive area.  The Charter is translated into many languages, reflecting Canada’s diversity.  To view an image, click and select it from the list below.  Use the special Zooming tool to zoom in, zoom out and move around as you explore each document.

One of the languages is Arabic, which will be especially helpful for the sharia boosters in the crowd.  This an exercise in official multiculturalism and of little practical use to people who might read the languages listed.  An immigrant educated enough to read a legal document is probably going to be able to read it in English.  Multiculturalism and the cult of diversity is not about making immigrants feel at home in Canada, it's about relieving the conscience of many very silly liberal WASPs.  The obvious harm, not to the liberal WASPs of course, but to the immigrants is that it gives them one less reason to learn the dominant languages and integrate.  The large John Hancock-esque signature of Pierre Trudeau is also a nice touch.  They may not be able to read our history but they'll know who invented it ex nihilo way back in 1982.

Magnum P.E.I.

To those familiar with the classic SCTV episode where they spoof the CBC - required viewing for all Can-Con enthusiasts - will recall the Magnum P.E.I. skit in which John Candy shouts "Drop the Potato."  In this case it was 10,000 cans of pop. 

A Prince Edward Island man who had almost 10,000 cans of pop seized in an Environment Department sting can't understand why the province is making such a fuss.

It is illegal to sell flavoured, carbonated beverages in cans on P.E.I. under a law that dates back to 1984, but it won't be on the books much longer. On May 1, the Island can ban will end.

"At this stage of the game, when they're going to be legalizing it in a couple of months, they could have given me perhaps a heads-up or a warning," Errol Waugh, who runs a bottle exchange in Kensington, told CBC News Wednesday.

Last week, when he heard people had been selling canned pop at the Jack Frost Festival in Charlottetown, Waugh decided to make a special off-Island trip. He brought back five pallets of Pepsi-Cola in his pickup — almost 10,000 cans.

On Tuesday, however, one of his customers turned out to be an undercover enforcement officer with the Environment Department. The canned pop bust was P.E.I.'s largest ever.

I wonder if the narc got a promotion for saving the island from the scourge of canned sugar water.

"A repeat of 1970's style stagflation?"

Speaking of reruns.

John Crow, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, remembers the stealth with which inflation wormed its way into the Canadian economy the last time that oil and food prices were soaring and the U.S. dollar was tumbling in the early 1970s -- exactly as they are today.

Canada's annual inflation rate rose from 1% in late 1970 to 5% in 1971. By 1974 it was at 12%.

"The bank was kind of shocked," said Mr. Crow, who joined the bank's research department in 1973 and finally vanquished the inflation beast when he was governor in the 1990s. "If you look at the numbers, they really moved up very quickly. There was a time at the beginning of the 1970s when the exchange rate shot up - and this is interesting from the point of view of today's exchange rate -- inflation was very low.... It wore off pretty quickly."

How odd that inflation never surprised anyone when we were on the gold standard. 

"The Best Premier Ontario Never Had"

The above is the most idiotic statement I've read all week.

Giving up his seat in the Ontario legislature in 1982 to make way for Bob Rae's switch from federal to provincial politics was one of the "greatest regrets" of former Ontario CCF and New Democrat leader Donald C. MacDonald's life, current provincial NDP leader Howard Hampton said Monday.

Often called the best premier Ontario never had, MacDonald died Saturday night of heart failure. He was 94.

MacDonald served as Ontario leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation from 1951 to 1961. When the CCF became the New Democratic Party in 1961, he continued as leader until 1970, when he was succeeded by Stephen Lewis.

MacDonald had represented the provincial Toronto riding of York South for the CCF and NDP from 1955 until he stepped down in 1982 to make way for Rae, who had been an NDP Member of Parliament and had just been elected as the party's Ontario leader.

"I think that's probably one of the biggest, deepest regrets in his life, and I know Donald well," Hampton told reporters Monday. "I spoke to him often, and he said that, it was one of the biggest regrets he ever had."

Hampton said MacDonald felt many of the things he had worked to establish were ignored or virtually eliminated when Rae became Premier of Ontario and led an NDP government from 1990-1995.

So MacDonald was further to the left than Bob Rae.  Imagine for a moment what an utter basket-case this province would be if MacDonald had been Premier in the 1950s and 1960s.  I'm occasionally reproached for my admiration for Premiers Leslie Frost and John Robarts, far more statist politicos than Mike Harris or Stephen Harper.  Politicians are creatures of their times, as most of us are, and must be judged as such.  The question is not that mistakes made under the Frost-Robarts governments latter came home to roost, but how much worse things might have been under a figure like Donald MacDonald.  Better Red Tories than actual Reds.

Medicare:  Socialism's Silent Killer

It may not be legally, but morally our current system is guilty of manslaughter every day of the week.

Inside Sylvia de Vries lurked an enormous tumour and fluid totalling 18 kilograms. But not even that massive weight gain and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer could assure her timely treatment in Canada.

Fighting for her life, the Windsor woman headed to the United States. In Pontiac, Mich., a surgeon excised the tumour - 35 centimetres at its longest - along with her ovaries, appendix, fallopian tubes, uterus and cervix. In addition, 13 litres of fluid were drained during that October, 2006, operation.

And there was little time to spare: Had she waited two weeks, she would have faced potential multiorgan failure, rendering her unstable for surgery, according to a letter from Michael L. Hicks, who performed the four-hour operation at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland.

"Based on my exam and experience as a gynecological oncologist, I felt it necessary to perform surgery within two weeks," said the letter written by Dr. Hicks, provided to Ms. de Vries's lawyer, Kate Sellar.

But a devastating cancer diagnosis was only the beginning of Ms. de Vries's troubles.

The Ontario Health Insurance Plan says it won't pay for the $60,000 cancer treatment because Ms. de Vries did not fill out the correct form seeking preapproval for out-of-country care.

That famous story, of Tommy Douglas nearly having his leg amputated because his parents were too poor to afford treatment, now has its modern counterpart, the many thousands of Canadians now facing bankruptcy and death because they didn't complete the right form.  A growing economy can, and in fact has, solved the problem of some people being too poor to afford basic and emergency treatment.  Socialism solves the problem of poverty by confiscating wealth, consuming quite a great deal in transferring it via the bureaucracy.  Capitalism solves the problem of poverty by creating wealth.  In many ways socialism is a backward looking philosophy, solving yesterday's problems using yesterday's methods.  It is really the world's second oldest wealth acquisition strategy, theft.  At least in regards to Medicare more and more Canadians are beginning to understand this fact.  The undermining of Medicare poses a grave threat to the Canadian welfare state, thus its frantic defense by the Left.  If the Pearson-Trudeau project's show piece program can't work, in what light does that place everything from official multiculturalism to social housing?

"How Are the Socialists in England Regrouping?"

That was the question WFB was asking on this day in 1984.  The full Firing Line episode guide list is available at the Hoover Institute, though unfortunately only a handful of episodes, including the last two, are available for video download.

In June 1983 the Labour Party had suffered its worst electoral defeat since the end of World War I, and the party leader, the radical socialist Michael Foot, predictably was ousted. So far left had the party gone, however, that it promptly chose another radical Socialist to succeed him. High on Mr. Kinnock‘s agenda, as we learn in this high-energy exchange, were nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from NATO, and expulsion of U.S. military facilities from Britain. NK: "It might be possible for a large country, with expanses of desert or prairies or water, to be able to accommodate [nuclear attack] without the total annihilation of society ... but it isn‘t plausible in Europe, where we live cheek by jowl, one with another, and we know that the use of any nuclear weapon would lead to the obliteration of our whole society."

Seems all so quaint now.  Thanks, in part, to WFB and Firing Line.

The Saddest Little Whorehouse in Hamburg

An old family business faces the modern world.

The oldest bordello in Hamburg's red-light district is shutting down for lack of business, according to newspaper reports published Friday.

The family-run Hotel Luxor, established in 1948, is being sold to an investor and will close down for good next month, madam Waltraud Mehrer said, according to the Hamburg Morgenpost and Bild newspapers.

She blamed the decline in business on easily available Internet porn, the rise of call-girl services, and "noisy discos and dance clubs" on the same street as her business, the newspapers reported.

"You can't make any big money selling sex in St. Pauli any more," she was quoted as saying, referring to the area that includes the red-light district. "The only thing still in operation are the table dance clubs."

The club's heyday was in the 1970s, when it was open 7 days a week, with 12 prostitutes on hand.

"Our customers were well off, they didn't scrimp," she said. "That's also changed today."

Hotel Luxor today employs four prostitutes, and is only open Tuesday through Friday nights.

"Two thousand euros (US$3,080) per night _ it was like that once," one of the women, who gave her name only as "Nicole," told the Morgenpost. "Now I can only dream of that. I've been here a year and only earn around euro200 (US$308) per shift."

As Bob Dylan screeched all those years ago, the times, they are a changin'.

Edmund Burke: Irishman

NRO explores the time and space between Dublin and Westminster.

"Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a little way East of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to an old doorway … of an eighteenth-century house … Number 12, Arran Quay."

For advocates of ordered freedom, Number 12, Arran Quay is an important address. Why? This is where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 and lived until he was 20, when, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he moved to London to study law, enter politics, and shape the course of history. Burke’s career as a Whig member of the British parliament, however, has tended to overshadow his birthplace in the popular imagination. It did not go unnoticed by Russell Kirk, who opens his classic study, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, with the literary signpost quoted above.

Where did this reformist impulse originate? Some scholars trace it, in part, to Ireland, where Burke witnessed first-hand the tenuous situation of Catholics, whose prospects were circumscribed by the self-aggrandizing habits of Anglo-Irish landlords and the residual effects of the Penal Laws (watered-down since their passage in the late 17th century, they still prevented many Catholics from joining certain professions, acquiring property, voting, or holding elective office). All of this would have cut close to the bone for Burke. He was a Protestant and a member of the Established Church, like his father, Richard (who, incidentally, may have converted in order to become a lawyer), but his mother, Mary Nagle, was a Catholic from the Blackwater Valley in Cork, where he spent time as a youth and would have encountered a Gaelic culture straining to maintain its customs, its religion and its land. In 1761 he observed these conditions again when he returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, a member of Parliament who had been appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the second-ranking official at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British administration in the country. Spending part of each year in his native land, he grew more agitated by the corrupt Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the enduring restrictions on Catholics. During this time, he penned one of his early political pamphlets, entitled Tract Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, which was an attack against the Penal Laws.

Along with his friend Adam Smith, Burke has been the victim of a very long running slander campaign by the Left.  Just as Adam Smith was caricatured as an apologist for businessmen, so Edmund Burke, defender of the American colonist and the oppressed of Ireland, has been called a blind defender of the status quo. The great divide between Anglo-American conservatism and the continental movements subscribing to the same name, is that only the English speakings people could have produced an Edmund Burke.  More than two centuries after his death his subtlety and insight continues to impress his admirers and confound his critics.  To those interested in Burke's Irish connection I can recommend Conor Cruise O'Brien, better known for his involvement in the Katanga Crisis of the early 1960s, introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Reflections.