Commercial director gives notes to Robert friggin’ DeNiro:

Yikes.

“The Ontario Tory plan to fund private schools continues to crumble,” says Dalton McGuinty adviser Warren Kinsella, based on the opposition of the Muslim Canadian Congress, whose statement on the subject Kinsella provides in full. Amazingly, that statement begins to explicitly disagree with McGuinty’s vision for Ontario education in just its second sentence:

The MCC stands for the separation of religion and state. Religious organizations have no role to play when government services are provided to the public. In every sphere of life where government interacts with its citizens—in law making and law enforcement, in utilities, transit, public recreation, social services, and above all, in education—religion is as irrelevant as gender or race.

For this reason the MCC demands that every province in Canada should have a single public school system, available to every child. We believe that only a single unified school systems should be supported by tax dollars.

On Saturday, Dan Gardner complimented McGuinty’s minions for thus far accomplishing the logically improbable - having their leader fiercely oppose funding for faith-based schools while declining to imperil the status quo (under which Ontario Catholics get a separate system), and not have anyone call him out. Well, one of McGuinty’s own advisers just did. Baffling.

L’Barouf, one of Montreal’s very finest watering holes is… well, it’s a pile of rubble. Frig. The plucky owners are promising to rebuild and reopen. I’m taking this unjustifiable optimism as evidence that they salvaged the irreplaceable men’s room fixtures.

…when Robert Fisk defends Jan Wong.

The mayor of Canada’s largest city weighs in on the shooting death of 11-year-old Ephraim Brown: “And the second thing we need is to take care of our own house.”

How many other politicians in the world would say something like that? In how many other jurisdictions would it pass without notice? It is to weep. If the next municipal election came down to this do-nothing, ideologically hidebound doughball vs. an inanimate carbon rod with vaguely fascist tendencies, I’d have to take a week’s vacation and think long and hard about it.