This makes a modicum of sense:

American rules that will require travellers to have a passport to enter the country will strain Canada-U.S. relations more than softwood lumber or the mad cow crisis ever did, Manitoba Premier Gary Doer said Wednesday.

"I think it will be more of an irritant, because more people will be directly impacted," Doer said as he entered a meeting of North American leaders.

While issues such as the softwood lumber dispute affected specific industries, the passport issue has the potential to bug anyone who travels between the two countries [who for some reason forgot to bring his or her passport –ed.], Doer said.

"This will be much more of a people issue," he said. "Softwood lumber was a huge negative drift for five years, and it still remains a file that is going to be debated in this country in terms of what we received and what we gave up, but the border will be a populist issue for all Canadians and, I suggest, many Americans."

There’s nothing in there to lose sleep over, but like I said — it’s not completely nutso. Enter the McGuinty:

McGuinty has been pushing the idea of enhancing the security features of driver’s licences so that they can be used as documentation for travellers.
…
"It’s going to compromise our ability to continue to maintain a friendship that is not derived on the basis of eight-second sound bites that come from my prime minister or your president, but on the basis of me going across the border with my family and interacting with people on the other side and vice versa."

My position on this has only hardened since last I wrote about it: Anyone who has thought this through and determined that Driver’s License 2.0 is the way to go either is simply trying to position himself in opposition to the Conservatives or is operating in a totally different universe than I am. A juiced up driver’s license isn’t going to help Americans and Canadians hold hands. It’s not going to help anyone except politicians do anything other than expend titanic quantities of money.

• Tweaking the passport system, for example to increase the term of validity, allow renewals, boost capacity and speed, or reduce cost, involves one bureaucracy — the aptly named Passport Canada. Overhauling the driver’s license would involve 15 bureaucracies: the Canadian and American federal governments, plus the 10 provincial and 3 territorial governments and their Ministries of Transport who (absurdly) all issue their own driver’s licenses.

• Tweaking the passport system involves no consultation or R&D. If you want to increase the term of validity or lower the price, you just do it. If you want to boost capacity and speed, you hire more people and buy more, um, passport-making machines. Overhauling the driver’s license would involve determining just what the Americans require — they themselves have little idea as yet — then determining how to meet those requirements, and then following through. The idea that the 15-Bureaucracy Model could complete that task before the day Canadians need enhanced ID to get into the US is 25-or-so parallels south of absurd.

• Relying on the passport is fiscally fair to Canadians, and just makes sense. Those with no intention of ever leaving Canada don’t need one and won’t be forced to pay for one. Juicing up the driver’s license will pass the costs on to every Canadian driver, which makes no more sense than the idea that a driver’s license could prove citizenship in the first place.

I’m willing to listen to valid arguments against the "get a damn passport" approach, but as this has yet to happen I’m not sure any exist. The "a passport is too big" complaint strikes me as a concern limited to those in the habit of crossing the border naked, clutching only a regulation-size wallet. Those who complain about the expense of a passport, meanwhile, seem to forget that a painfully low-tech driver’s license renewal (in Ontario at least) costs all of 12 bucks less than a passport and lasts exactly the same length of time. McGuinty seems to think it’s psychologically damaging, somehow. Surely this isn’t the best the license-boosters can do.

Cross-posted to the Shotgun.

Paul Jackson:

So with President George W. Bush inordinately low in the opinion polls — a situation engineered by the Lib-Left media, headed up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBC and CNN — what are the Republicans doing to try and hold the White House in 2008?

It boggles my mind that this hole hasn’t yet been plugged:

First, refugees and immigrants from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region are notorious for showing up at our border with no paperwork of any kind. After decades of war, destruction and general chaos in the region, original identity papers tend to be something of a collectors’ item.

And even among those who do have travel documents when they leave their country, many find it convenient to have none when they arrive at the Canadian border, especially if they are claiming refugee status.

Say what you will about the Safe Third Country Agreement, but the fact is you can’t show up at the Canadian border from the US and claim refugee status. And you can’t get on an international flight to Canada without paperwork. This means that every single person who arrives in Canada via commerical transport who lacks paperwork disposed of it somewhere between “the Afghanistan-Pakistan region” and Canada.

Thus, as far as I can see, any such people should be sent back whence they came with extreme dispatch. This new policy would have to be heavily advertised, naturally, but that shouldn’t be too hard. We could just print up a bunch of flyers to that effect and have every airline flying to Canada distribute them to those holding passports of countries from which we accept refugees.

Am I missing something, or is it just that simple?

British abortion law provides for extremely late-term abortions only through a “handicap provision”, under which it now emerges pregnancies have been terminated on the grounds of club feet, extra digits, and other easily correctible conditions. People are now worried about this:

Naomi Davis, a leading paediatric surgeon at Manchester children’s hospital who specialises in correcting club feet, said: “I think it’s reasonable to be totally shocked that abortion is being offered for this. It is entirely treatable. I can only think it is lack of information.”

So let me see if I have this right. Aborting your baby because you just don’t feel like dealing with it anymore is morally unimpeachable, but aborting your baby because it has a cleft palate is morally problematic.

If one of those things has to be better than the other, shouldn’t it be the latter? Aborting a fetus because the baby it will soon become will have some minor thing wrong with it is pretty bloody reprehensible, it says here, but a damn sight less reprehensible than aborting a fetus without even factoring the baby it will soon become into the equation.

Not that it came up all that often, but I was raised pro-choice like I was raised white and Anglo-Saxon: a woman had a right to an abortion whenever she wanted in the same way the earth was round and the sky was blue. Many people I know feel that way still, and yet many of them will find something troubling about aborting a club-footed or cleft-paletted fetus. I think I know why.

If you believe abortion on demand is morally okay, you have to accept that a fetus is part of its mother — not quite life; only the potential for life. But in mulling over abortion on demand for “defective” fetuses, you’re forced to look into the future and assess their prospects ex utero. You have to think of the fetus as a human being, in other words, and that’s utterly poisonous to the mainstream pro-choice mindset. If you think of clubfooted fetus Kristi Yamaguchi as an early version of champion figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, it’s hard not to start thinking of every fetus as an early version of a real live human being.

It’s interesting too that late-term vs. early-term abortions have nothing to do with this. The ethical issue in play (in that Times article I linked to above anyway) is whether you should be allowed to abort a fetus just because it has a treatable defect, not when. The abortions in question were late-term, I assume, because the disqualifying defects only became apparent at that point, but many treatable defects (to say nothing of negative genetic predilections) are detectable much earlier.

So let’s say science progresses to the point where club feet can be identified in a 15-week-old fetus ( well within Britain’s 24-week term limit, for anyone who still thinks that’s a factor). Will Britons then definitively say (or legislate) that a club-foot abortion is amoral but an abortion for personal reasons is okay? What about aborting a club-footed fetus, but for purely personal reasons? I’m not being glib. I’m just saying the point isn’t when you abort, or why — it’s whom.

All those who support term limits as a more civilized abortion situation need to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what difference it would have made to the world if they’d been aborted at 26 weeks as opposed to 12. And all those who support limiting the acceptable justifications for abortion need to perform the same mirror test and ask themselves what they’d think if they had been conceived by rape, or if their mother had died in childbirth.

I know, I know. What kind of country would prohibit a rape victim from having an abortion, or a woman for whom childbirth would likely be fatal? Apart from the Republic of Ireland, a lot of places that have nothing in common with Canada. But I’ll give the Irish credit. I think their situation and ours are the only ones that make any sense, precisely because they preclude all the impossible logical and moral somersaults that term limits and other restrictive laws ask us to turn.

In Ireland a fetus is a person; in Canada a fetus is nothing. To me, the rest is just false comfort.

(My previous forays into this conversation-killing topic can be found here:
November 7, 2003: No choice but pro-choice
October 29, 2004: The blind curing the blind
January 2, 2005: To be, or not to have been
March 10, 2005: Abort! Abort!
March 13, 2005: What’s so bad about dying anyway?
June 9, 2005: Pro-choice. But not that choice.
November 20, 2005: Up with the status quo
May 23, 2006: Abortion end run)

Oh look, the TTC isn’t running today! And that’s the end of any sympathy that particular transit commission is going to get from Torontonians in its various frivolous labour disputes for… well, l don’t want to get all hyperbolic here, so let’s just say a quarter century. Doesn’t matter if it’s a strike or a lockout. It’s breathtakingly idiotic.

UPDATE. Global says it started with maintenance workers not showing up to work and the TTC pulled the plug on the whole system “for fear that other workers wouldn’t show up.”

The Ontario Labour Relations Board, which in a stunning display of the system working properly managed to convene and make a decision by 7:10am on a Monday, has issued a cease and desist order.

UPDATE II. Rondi Adamson makes a good point about strike methods. The ATU seems conflicted as to whether or not they care what the public thinks of them. Today’s events seem to indicate that fundamentally they don’t, an embarrassing website gaffe (see 14:41 update) notwithstanding. And if that’s true, Adamson suggests they embrace the darkside:

Here is what the French transit workers would do: Allow you to go to work, blissfully trusting that the same subway cars and buses which took you in would take you back. Wait till about 4 in the afternoon, when you were preparing to go home (indeed, looking forward to it), and then announce the strike.

And a note to commenter Carol that’s slightly more polite than the suitably named “Anonymous”. Today really wasn’t about driver safety, as far as I can see. The drivers showed up ready to work. Certain maintenance workers showed up ready to strike, and claimed they were doing it on behalf of the drivers because it sounded better than saying they didn’t want their well-paid positions moved to the night shift.

If the TTC wants to do something to protect drivers on high-risk routes, I’m not against it. But there’s no significant risk on downtown routes, and considering the Cro-Magnon interpersonal skills a small minority of these operators possess (how hard is it, really, to call out the bloody stops like they’re supposed to?) I’m surprised they don’t absorb more abuse than they do.

UPDATE III. Based on The National I may have underestimated the drivers’ complicity in, or at least their unabashed support for, the job action.

Douglas Fisher in the Toronto Sun:

Then our Liberal governors — having said “no” to joining the Americans and Brits in Iraq — decided they didn’t want to be entirely on the outs with the Yanks. So, in a move that broke with the “blue beret” tradition, Paul Martin said we’d go to Afghanistan, to help fight the terrorists and rebuild that shattered place. We were suddenly back in the war-fighting game.

That’s not quite how I remember it.

The front page of today’s Toronto Star shows Dr. Tim Goddard, father of Nichola Goddard, next to his daughter’s flag-draped coffin, his right fist clenched and his face twisted in grief. The subhead reads: "In a tearful farewell to his daughter, Tim Goddard criticizes Ottawa for keeping the return of fallen soldiers private." The Toronto Sun ran with a different picture of Tim Goddard’s face twisted in grief, under the banner headline TEARS FOR A SOLDIER. Both, I’m sure, are factually correct. That doesn’t make them appropriate.

I happened to hear Tim Goddard interviewed on some Toronto radio show or other last week. His composure was inspirational, as it was during the part of his eulogy that ran on The National last night. I didn’t hear so much as a quiver in his voice as he explained how proud he is of the difference his daughter made in her short life.

We live in a time when refusing to behave as expected can make you a murder suspect. The problem is that to a significant extent the media creates those expectations. If you don’t believe me just check out the stomach-turning Nancy Grace on CNN. The Nichola Goddard story is one of dignified, confident resolve, both on her part and on her family’s. It’s a dangerous game criticizing the way people you don’t know handle grief, but I think we can all agree that the Goddard family handled theirs with unimpeachable courage. There’s your headline. Leave the tears out of it for once.

(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)

In Tuesday’s National Post, David Frum congratulated Michael Ignatieff on the political acuity he displayed in the Afghanistan vote, which is to say he accused him of being the perfect mincing, equivocal Liberal dauphin. It’s a particularly weak piece of partisan nonsense from Frum, mainly because its central deception is so transparent. His selective quotation of Ignatieff’s May 17 speech in the House of Commons, on which Frum’s column is based, pretty much says it all:

I also want to express my unequivocal support for the troops in Afghanistan, for the mission and for the renewal of the mission. However I do so in explicit disagreement with the New Democratic Party.

I support the mission precisely because it is the moment where we have to test the shift from one paradigm, the peacekeeping paradigm, to a peace enforcement paradigm that combines military, reconstruction and humanitarian effort together. I have been to Afghanistan and I believe this new paradigm can work.

Frum paints this as item #1 of Ignatieff’s escape plan should Afghanistan go pear shaped in the midst of his leadership campaign, which in some dimly lit corners would make naysayers Stephane Dion, Ken Dryden and Bob Rae look like geniuses:

In other words, Canada is not doing something in Afghanistan. It is testing something. But the essence of tests is that they can be failed. And once something has failed a test–why naturally, it must be discarded.

This holds together only until you’ve waded your way through what Jack Layton and Dawn Black (NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam) said, which is what Ignatieff was explicitly responding to. Layton:

New Democrats stand in opposition to the government’s plans to lock our country into a long term, war-fighting role in Afghanistan, a role that does not properly reflect the principles and ideals of the people of Canada.
…
Our foreign policy must reflect the reality that we are a country renowned for our pursuit of peace. We are a nation of facilitators, not occupiers. We are a people committed to the ideals of building bridges, not burning them.

And then, yikes, Dawn Black:

The NDP shares the concerns of many of Canada’s allies that the counter-insurgency approach cannot succeed, and if it cannot succeed, why are we there? Is it simply because the United States has asked us to be there because it wants out? Or is it simply because we do not have the imagination or wherewithal to devise a better approach? Or is it because we do not want to be elsewhere on a different, less macho, more explicitly humanitarian mission, saving the people of Darfur from a full-blown genocide?

“No, you idiots,” Ignatieff basically said. “The current strategy can work — is working, in fact — and it’s important for us to be there partially because Canada will have to play similar roles in the future.” But it was much more useful to Frum to frame it as prototypical Liberal ass-covering. And away he went:

Ignatieff then devoted the third paragraph of his four-paragraph speech to laying out the conditions that might cause him to change his mind:

“I have three questions . . . I support the mission but I want to know whether it is the mission that the Liberal government signed on to or whether it is a new mission. Therefore the questions are: Does the renewal of the mission imply more troops? Does it imply a change in the strategic direction of the mission? Does it imply a change in the balance between the military component, the reconstruction component and the humanitarian component?”

In other words, when Ignatieff said he was unequivocally committed to the mission, he meant the mission precisely as it existed before the Liberals left office. Any change in the mission’s “strategic direction” or its “balance” or in the number of troops will transform the mission into a “new” mission. And since both of those terms are studiously (even aggressively) vague, Ignatieff has reserved to himself almost perfect freedom to adjudge that the mission has morphed into something “new.”

And when it does, why then, Ignatieff will consider himself at liberty to reverse himself. “My support for the renewal of the mission is dependent upon believing that this proposal is continuous with, and not a departure from, the existing mission of the former government.”

In other words, while Ignatieff’s support is “unequivocal,” it is also highly conditional.

Put yourself in Ignatieff’s shoes, or any MP’s for that matter. You’ve been given 36 hours to decide whether you want to commit Canadian troops for two more years to Afghanistan, with no opportunity to amend the motion. You can see as plain as day that the Prime Minister is playing this for political gain — just a few weeks ago he ruled out a debate or a vote on Afghanistan on the grounds of troop morale (”It is not the intention of this government to start to question that mission when our troops are in danger,” he said on March 7. “To do so… would be a betrayal of the brave men and women we have in the field…”), and yet here you inexplicably are. Furthermore the Prime Minister has gone on record saying a “no” vote will still result in a one-year extension of the mission, which only underlines that the whole thing is a political exercise: the government will use your “yes” vote to justify anything and everything that happens in Afghanistan, or your “no” vote to paint you as unpatriotic and cowardly.

Faced with this no-win situation, Ignatieff voted his conscience and explained himself. Aside from abstaining that was the only thing he could possibly do, and it happened to be the right thing too, both politically and ethically. Stephen Harper’s speechwriters will want to know if the Liberal leadership candidates are for or agin, but I for one would rather know what they actually think.

(An aside: Every time I browse through Hansard I am gobsmacked yet again by the perdurable, incomputable uselessness of the New Democratic Party. Some of its members seem to imagine they are back in their high school model parliaments, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the chair-moisteners in the House are trying, however ineptly, to run a real-live country. For god’s sake, Dawn Black, what has Darfur got to do with Afghanistan? What kind of person wonders rhetorically aloud whether we’re staying in Afghanistan because it’s more macho than abandoning the mission half-done and decamping in the dead of night to the Sudan? What kind of person even says “macho” in the House of Commons?

The same kind of person, I guess, who begins an important speech with this:

Mr. Speaker, I rise today as a member of Parliament, as the defence critic for the New Democratic Party, and also as a concerned Canadian citizen, mother and grandmother.

When I became defence critic four months ago, I did not know a lot about military affairs…

Sweet Jesus. It’s like she’s running a course in how not to be taken seriously. Hansard doesn’t record gales of laughter, but I hope that elicited some. Note to the NDP: If you’re going to appoint a melodramatic, militarily illiterate granny as your defence critic, make sure she keeps it under her hat.)

The second period of this Oilers/Ducks game is the worst thing I have ever seen. I hope we can now, once and for all, put to rest the idea that NHL officiating is consistent. Ideally it would share a bed with the idea that NHL officiating is anything but an out-of-control practical joke.

UPDATE 9:33pm. How in holy Jesus can you not call that Rem Murray charge?! It led directly to the Laraque goal! Are these idiots for real?

Stompin’ Tom might be the most underappreciated person, place or thing in Canadian history, which makes his bitching and whining about a “cancelled” CBC television special all the more unbecoming. He’s taken his guitar and gone home in the past, but that was over much grander principles than being “snubbed”.