« February 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
April 26, 2008
Behold: Content
Kudos to Murray Whyte for hacking into the Toronto Star's web publishing system and somehow managing to file a story from Chicago about how handgun bans are not, repeat not, the be-all and end-all of solving urban gunplay. Recently at Macleans.ca, I took a stab at cramming David Miller's square proposal for an anti-handgun ban into the round hole of supply-and-demand economics and found that it didn't really fit. Or rather, I couldn't find the hole. Nobody knows how many Canadian "crime guns" come from domestic sources and how many are smuggled across the border, nor can anyone definitively say whether the latter supply would be unable to make up for cutting off the former. But it's symbolic, Miller and his fans will claim, and well it might be. The problem with symbolic statements of national intent, however, is that there is no national intent in Canada. There are law-abiding handgun gun owners who consider this none of their business, there are symbol-happy urbanites like Miller and hundreds of thousands of other Torontonians, and there are millions of people in between.
With that out of the way, I present a random sampling of other relatively recent other contributions to the Maclean's empire:
A Q&A with Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft. It's just as breathtakingly exciting as it sounds!
A tragically, scandalously short contribution to the magazine about the return of the McRib.
A probably too-long short contribution to the magazine on the occasion of junior Tory pitbull Pierre Poilievre's visit to Toronto to turn his nose up at the Ontario budget. (Honestly, I've never encountered anyone less prepared to answer the most basic question imaginable—"What are you doing here?")
A history of brutal Leafs trades. And, with my colleague Philippe Gohier, what I think is a rather fun "Harper's Index"-style rundown of the blue-and-white nightmare.
For the love of cripes, why can't we get rid of drugs in Canadian prisons?
British Columbia is the capital of Canadian kidnapping. Thankfully, the perpetrators are all morons.
Human rights legislation protects drug addicts, but not casual drug users. Discuss.
Shock-horror! Bosses don't have to give Ontarians Family Day off! But then, they don't have to give them Christmas Day off either...
With regard to Robert Latimer's case, a look at how other jurisdictions have dealt with gut-wrenching child murders.
A naive attempt to hold commentators in the abortion debate to account for their pronouncements, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of R. v. Morgentaler.
And, of course, you will want to visit Macleans.ca's new blog setup, which is, to say the absolute bloody least, extremely better than it was. Soon—very soon—there will be comments. Ideally, Megapundits I have slighted will turn up to exact their awful revenge.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2008
Did we say 48 hours' notice? We meant two.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2008
Revenge of the striped monkeys
There was appalling refereeing in St. Paul and Newark tonight. Words can scarcely describe the awfulness of it. And nobody cares. Pierre McGuire, that useless bloviate, didn't even see fit to comment on a stomach-turning call by one of Dan O'Halloran or Eric "Who?!" Furlatt against Minnesota's Kim Jonsson that put the Wild down 6-on-4 and led directly to a last-minute tying goal that's sending the game, as I write this, to overtime. (Keith Carney just won it. Good. Go Wild. No, wait, looks like it might very well have been kicked in, but they're not even going to bother reviewing it, because... well, who knows. Mike Murphy wants to go to bed, maybe. (UPDATE: Consensus, among those bothering to mention it, seems to be it went off Ruslan Salei's skate.))
In New Jersey, meanwhile, Brent Sutter quite justifiably threw a stick on the ice in fury and escaped any censure. Why? Because the interference call against Jamie Langenbrunner--and the subsequent, dead-easy even-up non-call against the Rangers--was too god-awful. Too completely, jaw-droppingly wrong. Sutter would have torn one of Dave Jackson or Chris "Who?!" Rooney a third corn-chute.
Please, NHL. Stop this.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2008
Off to a good start
First of all, Ottawa--I mean, what one even say about defeat that wretched? Ideally I'd like to actually watch competitive hockey, but watching the Senators ritualistically smear themselves with their own feces has always been an acceptable substitute. Methinks I'll be smiling in my sleep thinking of that Redden/Whitney "fight."
Meanwhile, at the H.P. Pavilion, Greg Kihn sings the national anthem! Well played, San Jose. Well played.
Posted by Chris Selley at 10:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2008
Multiple wives, mass confusion
Courtesy of the Province, I bring you pretty much the exact opposite of the truth:
Special prosecutor Richard Peck was appointed by Attorney General Wally Oppal last year to submit a legal opinion on polygamy.
Section 293 of the Criminal Code prohibits "any form of polygamy [or] entering into a conjugal union with more than one person at the same time." The maximum penalty is five years in prison.
But Mr. Peck found the law likely would not survive a challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the ground it infringes the constitutional guarantee to freedom of religion.
Mr. Peck found no such thing, and he couldn't have been much clearer about it:
After extensive study of the relevant material, I have come to the conclusion that polygamy itself is at the root of the problem. Polygamy is the underlying phenomenon from which all the other alleged harms flow, and the public interest would best be served by addressing it directly. There is a substantial body of scholarship supporting the position that polygamy is socially harmful. With great respect to those who have given opinions to the contrary, I believe that s. 293 may well be upheld by the courts as consistent with the Charter’s commitment to religious freedom. Religious freedom in Canada is not absolute. Rather, it is subject to reasonable limits necessary to protect "public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others." Ultimately, in my opinion, there is a good case for upholding s. 293 as compliant with the Charter.
Indeed, had Peck been predisposed against such an argument, it's unlikely Oppal, who's made quite a show about finally tackling the Bountiful problem, would have sought his opinion. But Mr. Oppal's tough talk has evidently escaped the notice of Adam Yoshida, one of the denizens of the ostensibly less crazy new incarnation of the Western Standard, who believes officially legalized polygamy is on its way to Canadian shores, thanks mostly to liberals. Today, he blogged thusly: "[C]an you really imagine Wally Oppal - or anyone else in this most cautious of Provincial Governments - having the guts to step out and say something like, 'polygamy is wrong, abusive, and runs contrary to our fundamental values.'"
Google doesn't really get along with Macleans.ca all that well. (We're just a little too real, I think.) But for what it's worth, I can certainly imagine Oppal saying something like that, because he said it to me some months ago:
I think right-thinking Canadians can't believe the principle of freedom of religion is absolute, that we would throw away all our other principles in order to abide by that principle. That's the argument that's always raised, that the freedom of religion under the Constitution allows people to go to their own devices, as long as everybody consents, on religious grounds. I just happen to think that there are other issues involved here, such as equality of women, the apparent treatment of women as objects and property, and those are things that I think are intolerable in our society.
This doesn't explain why it took six months, instead of Oppal's predicted one month, for Leonard Doust to reaffirm Peck's original opinion—which is that Oppal should send the anti-polygamy section of the Criminal Code to the British Columbia Court of Appeal (and thence, likely, to the Supreme Court of Canada) as a reference case. It makes all kinds of sense, and I'm not sure why Oppal was leery of it in the first place. But I don't think he's talking tough for squeaks and gigs--where's the benefit in that? I'm still holding out a lot of hope that this truly outrageous situation in the B.C. interior can be resolved, legally anyway, in the relatively near future. Bountiful has been allowed to operate outside the law because the B.C. Attorney-General's office has, in the past at least, been terrified that Canada's human rights framework might deem the community's lifestyle legally permissible. Everyone--polygamists, doctrinaire libertarians, and pragmatists who think legalization might actually improve conditions for women and children--should be able to appreciate how silly that is.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack