The Blog of Record

The problem is that environmentalists don’t want it:

Canada’s oil sands hold an estimated 170 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered with existing technology and as much as 1.7 trillion barrels — more than five times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves — that could be produced with the use of new methods that are being developed.

As the only non-OPEC source with the capability for large production growth during the next several years, oil sands have the potential to reduce the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ revenues, weakening the cartel and those members that often undertake policies hostile to U.S. interests.

By getting more of their oil from Canada, refineries in the Midwest are moving from being at the back of the crude oil supply line to the front. With these secure supplies, Midwest refineries are not as vulnerable to supply disruptions from overseas producers or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

So who would object to Canadian oil sands?

Eenvironmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are trying to shut down Canadian oil sands production and block the expansion of refineries here in the U.S.

If the environmental groups truly cared about achieving results in their battle against global warming, they would better focus their energy on the construction of scores of power plants in rapidly developing economies like China and India that account for most of the increase in the world’s carbon emissions. These developments pose the real global environmental danger, not the Canadian oil sands.

A truly sad story from Canada.

More here.

In a country like Canada this question is, of course, purely hypothetical. But it’s really just a particular case of a wider question: Is immigration policy still a means of ensuring a country’s continued development – and then the country is entitled to pick and choose whom it wants as new citizens based on their acceptance of its values, - or is it… well, I can’t imagine what else it can be.

Actually, I can – there’s Britain, where the Labour government has been importing Muslims by the million, while making sure to do nothing to integrate them, as the surest way to expand Labour’s voter base.

A Frenchman, an Englishman, a black man, a Chinaman and an Eskimo are on another planet. The planet is about to blow up. Only three of them can get in the rocket. Sounds like a joke, but it’s a social studies exercise to teach multiculturalism to little kids in New Brunswick, Canada:

A teacher at the Ecole Mont-Carmel in the village of Ste-Marie-de-Kent recently gave the Grade 4 students a sheet that asked them to imagine an Acadian francophone was on another planet with an anglophone, a black African, a Chinese person, and an aboriginal person.

The students were told the planet was going to explode in 10 minutes, and were asked which three of the five people should take a seat in a rocket that would escape the explosion.

A spokeswoman for the Education Department says the mother of one of the students complained to the school’s principal, saying her daughter was upset by having to make the choice.

That girl is the only child in the class from a different ethnic or racial group, which is not a surprise in a French-Canadian village.

Another attack on free speech by Canada’s totalitarian “hate speech” prosecutors:

As if Barbara Hall’s own crude, broadsword agency were not destructive enough of free speech rights, now the Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) wants a national press council to further chill free expression in the media. And she is not looking just to curtail newspapers, talk radio and television news. Ms. Hall wants any new press council to have jurisdiction over Internet sites and blogs, too.

In a report to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Ms. Hall’s OHRC recommends a national media watchdog to which all publishers, webmasters and radio and television producers would be forced to belong.

The OHRC insists such a body need not “cross the line into censorship,” but it is hard to see how it could avoid it. As conceived by Ms. Hall and her activist cocommissioners, a national press council would have the power to accept complaints of discrimination — “particularly from vulnerable groups” –against any member paper, station or Web site. And while the council, at least initially, would have no power to prevent media outlets from printing, posting or broadcasting what they wished, it could force them to carry the council’s decisions, including counterarguments made by complainants.

It’s hard not to view these recommendations as a direct response to the OHRC’s frustration with its own inability to persecute Maclean’s magazine and columnist Mark Steyn for what the commission viewed as the pair’s “Islamophobic” views. Last April, the OHRC was forced to drop its investigation of columns and news stories carried by Maclean’s because the legislation governing the commission did not give it authority to investigate published work.

As the very example of Canada’s “Human Rights” Commissions shows, such institutions, once created, quickly gain more and broader powers to curtail and prosequte free speech. And the entire point of the proposed national censorship board is to be more powerful than the provincial censorship bodies that already exist.

From The Province, a Canadian newspaper:

Rapt eyes shone as Obama spoke with stunning eloquence of re-building America. When the president delivered perhaps his most impressive rhetorical offering, telling the world’s tyrants, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” many in the audience gasped audibly at the sheer power of his language.

I haven’t seen a group of people wearing their fervour so completely, and so uniformly, since a guy I used to work with brought me to visit his weird sex cult in California.

But maybe Obama, unlike the cult leader in the purple house, really deserves this worship.

Millions of Canadians and Americans are expecting nothing short of a revolution in the way the United States is run. Obstacles to change are huge — powerful corporate and political interests stand in the way, and will fight to maintain a regime that favours the few, domestically and around the globe.

(Via Jonah Goldberg.)

They say they suffered white-out but survived on a high-calorie diet of deep-fried bacon, cheese and butter.

This diet made perfect sense for them. During low-intensity activity, such as walking - even if it’s walking through snow, – the body uses mostly fat for energy. A diet high in fat, with moderate protein and virtually no carbs, is ideal for long bouts of such activity. And a fatty meal keeps you satiated for a long time because there are no spikes and falls in blood sugar and insulin levels. This is helpful when you are trying to beat a record and need to minimize the time you spend eating without feeling hungry all the time. Oh, and it’s a perfectly healthy diet – just ask the Eskimos.

A researcher sets out to prove that all white people are racists, and – surprise, surprise! – that’s what her study finds. Racism is pretty much extinct in Canada, so associate professors of psychology have to work extra-hard to find it and keep it alive.

They planned to kill themselves after killing their children, but she survived and called 911. Both had recently lost their jobs and the story mentions financial trouble, but this can’t be the reason, one would assume.

• “… freedom is unknown in Islam, it contradicts Islam, therefore it is a false concept”.
• Homosexuals and lesbians should be “exterminated in this life”.
• Jews “spread corruption and chaos on earth”.
• Most Infidels “live like animals”.

Kill gays, kill infidels, kill apostates, and so on and so forth. Written and published (and, I suspect, preached in his mosque) by an imam enjoying free life – and legal privileges over non-Muslims – in Canada.

I’m afraid I know where the next 9/11-scale bombers will come from. Canada seems to have followed pre-7/7/2005 Britain in thinking it has a gentlemen’s agreement with Islamists. Britain believed that if it allowed them to set up their operations within it as long as they didn’t include training camps that could be seen from space, it would be spared. Its reward was the London bus and subway bombings.

A Canadian cop that was a British cop before compares the two systems of policing:

I certainly have fewer powers than I did before:
-I’m not allowed to arrest suspects, I have to have (in UK terms) sufficient evidence to charge before I can arrest.
-I can’t put people on Police bail, it’s not a concept that exists here.
-I can’t Stop and Search people.
-I can’t normally search people’s houses without a warrant.

British police certainly has no lack of powers:

In the UK, if you merely suspect someone, you can arrest them, take them to a cell for 24 hours, interview them and search their house.

What is interesting is the effect these powers have:

So what are you NOT doing, while you’re in custody, in the interview room, taking the statements, searching the house and otherwise investigating? You’re not on patrol, you’re not preventing the next crime from occurring and you’re not giving the remaining 99% of sober, honest taxpayers value for money.

The U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on December 10, 1948. You’d think 60 years would’ve been plenty of time for a country like Canada to implement it – and you’d be right. If you didn’t count small things like equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair and public trial, and freedom of speech.

Only six weeks after the federal election that gave Stephen Harper’s Conservatives a broader mandate, the Liberals and New Democrats are trying to steal the government from them. And they are likely to succeed.

So what if you lost the election if you can game the system and screw the voters? You just have to make a backroom deal with a separatist party that doesn’t see itself as part of the country, and you’ll get your wish.

During the October 14 general election, the question was whether the Conservatives will get a majority or only a much larger share in their minority government. The people decided not to give them a majority so the government would stay closer to the center. They clearly didn’t vote for a left – ultra-left coalition resting on separatist support.

Thoughts from Canadian expat Mark Steyn.

National Post:

Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., has hired six students whose jobs as “dialogue facilitators” will involve intervening in conversations among students in dining halls and common rooms to encourage discussion of such social justice issues as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability and social class.

“Ability”. They sure know their PC terminology. But “sexual orientation”? Don’t they know it’s “lifestyle choice” now?

[T]heir activities will also include formal discussion sessions, perhaps after controversial incidents in residence, and open discussions of topical books or movies.

I take it to mean that students won’t be able to just tell the thought cop to take a hike.

[T]he six facilitators will receive full room and board and a stipend for the full-year commitment, and will receive regular training.

Way to spend taxpayer money for a public university.

It is just one of many recent efforts to promote diversity – such as gender-neutral washrooms, prayer space, and halal and kosher food service – at a school that is still smarting from a report on systemic racism two years ago that criticized its “culture of whiteness.”

FINALLY, the real reason. Can you imagine how SCARED a Canadian university gets when it’s hit with a report by an “anti-racism expert” accusing it of “systemic racism”? No wonder they are bending over backwards to show how much they love minorities.

But don’t call the anti-racism diversity warriors fascists. Remember, only conservatives are fascists.

(Via Newsbeat 1.)

The Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s lead “hate speech investigator” hacked a woman’s wireless Internet account to make racist posts under a fake name on a site in order to charge its owner with hate speech (which, of course, is a crime in Canada). The Royal Canadian Mounted Police says there’s nothing it can do.

(Via Newsbeat 1.)

Via American Digest.

Via Bits & Pieces.