July 2010 Archives

Here's my latest column in the Sun:

Time to face facts on burkas

Some 54% of Canadians want to ban the burka, the head-to-toe shroud worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women in the West, but the common dress in medieval backwaters like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

According to a Leger Marketing poll commissioned by QMI Agency, support for a ban is highest in Quebec at 73%.

Burkas are rare in Canada. They totally obliterate the identity of the woman inside. The face is covered with a mesh grille, like a beekeeper’s hat.

But less rare is the niqab, which leaves a slit open for the eyes.

More common still is the hijab, which covers the head and neck like a scarf.

Get to know those words, as you’ll be seeing more of them in the years ahead.

Others are planning to teach your daughters about them. Last fall, Mattel sponsored an exhibition featuring Barbie in a burka.

Canada’s misguided experiment with multiculturalism pretends that all cultural ideas are equal, and Canadian values, such as the equality of men and women, are no better than foreign values like the subjugation of women.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, enacted in 1982 when our Muslim population was tiny, is contradictory.

Section 27 of the Charter calls for “the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

But Section 28 says that rights “are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”

Well, which is it? “Enhancing” Saudi values? Or guaranteeing women’s equality?

Because you can’t have both.

Margaret Atwood published her sci-fi novel The Handmaid’s Tale, about America being taken over by a Christian theocracy that treats women as sexual property, 25 years ago.

It has become trite to watch cultural liberals like Atwood bravely attack imaginary discrimination, while staying silent on real discrimination.

The Handmaid’s Tale won Atwood the Governor General’s Award for fiction. A book about the subjugation of women in radical Islam would win Atwood a death threat.

Atwood loves posing as a feminist at champagne receptions in her honour. But she’ll leave the heavy lifting to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

She’s the Somali refugee who wrote and narrated a movie called Submission, about the place of women in radical Islam.

The film’s producer, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered for it, but a note pinned with a knife into his body referred primarily to Hirsi Ali, who has had to live under around-the-clock security ever since.

That’s all a bit too real for Atwood, and is the reason why other feminists like the once-noisy Judy Rebick are so meek and gentle with the real butchers of women’s rights.

So, should the burka be banned?

It’s anathema for a free country like Canada to tell citizens how to dress.

The same liberty that allows the rest of us to dress as we like is the liberty that allows a woman to hide her face.

But what about in a bank?

Should masked women, Muslim or not, be allowed into a bank? If that’s okay, how about a man in a ski mask?

How about testifying in court?

Who else can hide their eyes and facial expressions while condemning an accused or swearing to their own innocence?

And why stop at witnesses — what about judges or police officers in a burka?

What about ID cards like a driver’s licence?

What point is an ID card if it doesn’t actually ID you?

Can you vote with a mask on? Board a plane?

If a burka is okay, how about a Ku Klux Klan mask?

But more than all that, is wearing a burka truly an act of individual liberty?

For some it is. But for others, it is a manifestation of tyranny — a brutal husband demanding submission; a radical imam threatening frightened immigrant women.

We know from the case of Aqsa Parvez — killed by her father and brother for dressing in western fashion rather than in traditional Islamic clothing — that defying these orders can lead to murder.

In Afghanistan, uncovered women have acid thrown in their faces.

Only 54% of us want a ban?

Here's my latest Sun column. I'd love your comments.

Monument to jihad

I’ve got this great idea: Let’s open a shooting range next to the L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

What, too soon after the Montreal Massacre?

Well how about a museum, overlooking Pearl Harbor, dedicated to the military accomplishments of Japanese Emperor Hirohito?

Too tasteless?

OK. How about a 13-story, $100-million mosque at Ground Zero in New York City, on the rubble of a building that was damaged on 9/11? And let’s have it run by a Muslim radical who believes America had it coming. And let’s give the mosque a jihadist name: Cordoba House, named after the capital of the Muslim conquest of Spain centuries ago. And let’s make it a headquarters for Dawah, the Arabic word for promoting sharia law.

Alas, this is no joke. And the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, couldn’t be happier.

Then again, Bloomberg has trouble separating wishful liberal thinking from reality.

When a car bomb was discovered in Times Square this spring, Bloomberg announced his suspicions on national

TV: “Somebody with a political agenda, that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.”

Actually, it was a Pakistani trained terrorist named Faisal Shahzad.

The driving force of the mosque is a radical imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf.

Just weeks after 9/11 he told 60 Minutes that America had it coming—U.S. policies were to blame, andAmericans were “an accessory to the crime.”

That’s like telling a rape victim it’s her fault for wearing a skirt.

Rauf helped organize the recent terrorist flotilla that set sail for Gaza. He refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization. But he has no trouble condemning “Christians in World War II” for bombing civilians in Hiroshima.

Rauf won’t even admit that Islamic terroristswere responsible for 9/11 itself. He told a New York radio station that’s just the “general perception.”

Rauf has been working on his plans for Ground Zero for a while. He published a book called A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da’wah in the Heart of America Post-9/11. It’s about expropriating the symbol of the crumbling U.S.—that can’t even build a memorial to 9/11 after nine years, let alone rebuild the towers — and contrasting it with a gleaming new tower of Saudi-style propaganda.

But even America-hating radicals have the right to build mosques in America, even at Ground Zero. That’s what makes America different from Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslims aren’t allowed to set foot in Mecca, let alone build a church.

But does the Saudi government have the right to build at Ground Zero? According to the Washington Times, the

Cordoba Initiative has assets of just $20,000 and total revenues since 2004 have been $100,000. How do you get from there to $100 million?

Rauf won’t say, but hints at outside funding.

Saudi Arabia has a religious foreign ministry, called the Muslim World League. It gave $7 million to build Toronto’s

Islamic Centre, and more to mosques in Calgary and Montreal.

Are they the source? There are 100 mosques in New York City. But the Ground Zero mosque isn’t really a mosque. It’s a jihadist headquarters. And if the secret $100 million is from Saudi Arabia, it’s not even a mosque at all—it’s a clandestine embassy for the country from which 15 out of 19 9/11 terrorists came.

Federal court embarrassment

In 1999, an immigrant from Iran named Ali Tahmourpour enrolled in the RCMP’s police academy, but washed out after just 12 weeks.

When Tahmourpour got the bad news, he had a breakdown. His classmates escorted him to the infirmary twice because he was “vomiting, shaking, hyperventilating and was incoherent.”

An RCMP psychologist declared him to be a suicide risk. Three of his fellow cadets testified, “they would be afraid to work with him in the field.” A note was put on his file: Unlike other wash-outs, Tahmourpour would not be allowed to reapply as a student.

Others might have moved on, but not Tahmourpour. He cried racism. And he ran to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, claiming the RCMP violated his “human right” to become a cop.

Ever since, he has done nothing but sue and appeal, sue and appeal. He went on welfare. He took a real estate course and sold one house as of 2008. For 10 years he didn’t put much effort at all into finding a job, according to the Human Rights Commission. Not exactly the way to convince the RCMP they had misjudged him.

But Tahmourpour didn’t need to impress the RCMP. He just needed to impress the Federal Court of Appeal. Last week, they upheld a human-rights ruling calling the RCMP racist and ordering them to readmit Tahmourpour to the academy.

It’s not the first time Tahmourpour has been before the Federal Court of Appeal crying racism.

Back when he was a student, Tahmourpour worked for Revenue Canada. They liked him enough to offer him a permanent job, but Tahmourpour filed a human rights complaint anyway. He spent three years suing and appealing. It was a test run for his RCMP lawsuit.

In Shakedown, my book about Canada’s human rights commissions, I included Tahmourpour’s case as one of the worst cases in Canada. It unfairly smears the RCMP, it rewards a layabout and, if allowed to stand, will destroy any personnel standards for the RCMP.

Tahmourpour won his case despite the human rights tribunal acknowledging he “had difficulty performing competently in scenarios, and that this was largely a function of his inability to listen to people, to integrate the information he received and to formulate an appropriate course of action based on that information.” In other words, Tahmourpour isn’t very bright and can’t make decisions. He was “evasive,” and his testimony was “contradictory” and “implausible.”

But they ruled in his favour anyway.

In the whole trial, there was not a shred of evidence of racism. Tahmourpour complained his firearms instructor swore at him. And that’s true. Const. Brendon McCarney, a visible minority too, testified he also hated the firearms instructor.

“He would yell at the cadets right in their faces, very close to them,” he said. But McCarney said “anyone who made a mistake was yelled at … including Caucasian cadets.”

Tahmourpour claims other instructors were rude to him, too, calling him a “coward” and “incompetent.” But how’s that racist?

Tahmourpour was the one who just wouldn’t shut up about race. He insisted on wearing a big amulet — claiming it was part of being Muslim. That’s against RCMP rules, just like wearing a crucifix is. But when an instructor announced he would grant an exemption, Tahmourpour claimed mentioning it in front of everyone was racist.

Another time, Tahmourpour was asked to sign some papers, but he did so in Persian, with a large artistic flourish. Tahmourpour claims a instructor was racist for asking “What kind of f---ing language is that, or is it something you made up?” The instructor denies it.

Crazy is the new normal at human rights commissions. But that craziness is infecting the Federal Court of Appeal. That’s the same court — the same judge, even — that ordered the government to bring accused terrorist Omar Khadr back to Canada.

This ruling needs to be appealed. The RCMP needs to be protected from this witch hunt. And the Federal Court of Appeal needs to be brought back in touch with Canadian values, not Iranian values.

I don't know about you, but other than learning more about the census, the most interesting thing in Ottawa is getting to know what kind of Ignatieff Michael Ignatieff is.

What kind of Ignatieff is he? How can I get to know the Ignatieff he is?

"I am not a cold man," [Ignatieff] said. "I am, as my wife could tell you, a man with sometimes too much passion, too much emotion.

"I try to be disciplined in public. Little by little, people will get to know the Ignatieff I am, that I have always been. I am doing a public tour to be close to people."

I think what we really need, to get to know the Ignatieff that he is, is a movie called Being Michael Ignatieff. 

I can't dig up my original 1996 Sun column wherein I announced my refusal to complete the long-form census that year -- the online archives I can find don't go back that far. But I'm sure I made the same points I make in today's Sun newspapers about the nosy parkers trying to find out all sorts of irrelevant details about the lives of others.

I was never charged with an offence under the Statistics Act, though I had a first-rate lawyer lined up to defend me pro bono if that happened. Instead, I was just pestered by a cascade of increasingly senior census takers who just didn't understand why I didn't want to tell them my race and ethnicity. (One was quite funny, without trying to be; she thought the problem was I didn't want to physically fill out the form, so she offered to write my answers for me. Nope, illiteracy wasn't my problem.)

In the end they let me go. I wonder if I would have been convicted if they did charge me -- probably. I don't know if I'd take such a stand again today, or if I would do what tens of thousands of other Canadians do: like jamming the system by telling the government they're not black or white or Jewish or Somali. They're jedi knights. (Congrats to the Western Standard team for the great website idea and quick execution.)

Here's my Sun column:

So long, long form

The next census comes around in 2011, and the federal government just announced the long form of the census will be voluntary, instead of mandatory, for randomly selected Canadians chosen for the extra work.

As someone who received the long-form census in 1996 — and refused to complete it — let me tell you why this is a good thing.

The regular census is short. It asks who lives in your house and some questions about how everyone is related to each other. It also asks about language use — information that fuels Canada’s bilingualism policy. That’s about it.

But the long-form census feels like it was written by the biggest gossips in the country. The 2011 version hasn’t been released yet, but the 1996 one can still be seen online.

Some of it is the basic stuff. But how about this: Question 7 demanded everyone in your home describe any physical or mental-health condition, and what limits that places on your school, work or home life.

Sorry, that’s just none of the government’s business. It’s supposed to be a census, not a peek through a family’s medicine cabinet.

This so-called census also asked Canadians to tell the government who did what chores and errands in the house — which parent helped the kids with homework; which parent drove them to sports; who did the shopping; who talked “with teens about their problems.”

And a helpful bureaucrat would be right there to write it all down.

That’s not what really bothered me, though.

Question 19 demanded Canadians define themselves according to ethnicity.

And “Canadian” wasn’t an option.

The census gave a list of different alternatives including some colours (white and black) and a continent (Latin American). What would U.S. President Barack Obama, whose mom was white, choose — both white and black? Why weren’t brown or red or yellow allowable colours?

What on earth does “Latin American” mean as an ethnicity? Latin Americans come in every race and ethnicity — black, Aboriginal, white or, like Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, Japanese. And why was Latin America a choice, but not North America?

Stranger still, black was actually explained not by colour but by country. It included African, which would include white South Africans.

But Arab/West Asian was another choice, even though the examples included Egyptian and Moroccan (which are in Africa, not Asia) and Iranian, which is a country that is overwhelmingly Persian in ethnicity — not Arab.

Some ethnically homogenous countries were listed (Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Chinese) but many others weren’t.

The choices just made no sense.

And then there was the answer marked “other”.

In another question, the census asked your “cultural group.” It listed only one religion (Jewish), and several countries. Is Jewish a country?

Given that “etc.” was also listed, it’s not surprising that in a recent census, 21,000 Canadians described themselves as Star Wars Jedi Knights.

What are these bizarre questions and answers about? The census form was perfectly frank: It stated it was for government programs that use racial quotas — also called affirmative action. As Canadians, we like to think we’re equal before the law. But Statistics Canada collects this information to treat us unequally.

Let the nosy bureaucrats pound sand: Scrapping the mandatory long-form census is a small victory against big government.

I've written about Conrad Black's prosecution a few times in various publications. Here's something I wrote for Canadian Lawyer magazine a while back that I think is relevant today:

Role reversal and the Conrad Black trial

What do you think of the trial of Conrad Black? Hold your answer for a moment while you do a small thought experiment. Imagine if the Canadian on trial in Chicago wasn’t a conservative media baron, but a liberal one. Those exist, too. Someone like the publisher of the Toronto Star.

Now go further, because Black isn’t just a conservative businessman. He’s a conservative champion, an activist. So a more accurate analogy would be Maude Barlow or Stephen Lewis, or Mel Hurtig at least. None of them have ever created billions of dollars of wealth in the private sector, but they’ll do for our purposes.

Imagine if the prosecutor in Chicago wasn’t a Democrat with impeccable anti-Bush credentials like Patrick Fitzgerald, who made a name for himself by chasing Dick Cheney. Imagine if the prosecutor was an arch-Republican, someone such as Ken Starr, who made a name for himself chasing Bill Clinton.
What if Hurtig had been indicted in the U.S. for a Canadian business deal — a deal that has not led to any charges under Canada’s securities laws?

What if the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sought the extradition of Hurtig, and hit him with the largest bail — $20 million — ever levied in American history, more than extracted from the Enron or WorldCom defendants?

Is there any doubt about what the response from official Canada would be?

Amnesty International would call the charges against Hurtig political, and would issue a report, downgrading the independence of the U.S. judiciary. The report would be filed at the United Nations, amidst much clucking.
PEN and other freedom of the press groups would hold fundraising dinners in Hurtig’s honour. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter would be the keynote speaker, talking about the excesses of American prosecutors. Nelson
Mandela would send his regards by video, from one freedom fighter to another.

Parliament would issue proclamations and declarations and execrations. How dare the United States seek jurisdiction over a Canadian publishing legend. How dare the Ontario Securities Commission meekly make way for the Securities Exchange Commission — even assist in its legwork? How dare the state of Illinois try to colonize the province of Ontario with its legal system?

The law reviews would describe how modern U.S. prosecutions crush defendants before trials even start, under the cost of endless motions and hearings, how anti-racketeering statutes have been abused against innocent businessmen, and how the overgrowth of corporate governance laws has become a bigger problem than that which they sought to remedy.

One clever law professor would propose Hurtig be granted diplomatic status for immunity from U.S. prosecution. The NDP would propose a motion to that effect in Parliament.

Free Hurtig T-shirts would sprout up alongside the Free Mumia and Che Guevara shirts on campuses. Hurtig would be made an honorary doctorate of laws. A Canadian Supreme Court justice would award it. There would be hugging.

And the media. The pages of the papers would be filled with lurid details of excess —not of Hurtig’s personal extravagances, but those of the U.S. prosecutors, and how they and his civil antagonists have spent close to $100-million so far pursuing Hurtig, $100-million of taxpayers’ money and shareholders’ money, a sum already far greater than the total amount of the non-competition payments in question.

They would talk about how the out-of-control American culture of litigators of fortune — private lawyers out for massive fees, public lawyers out for politically favourable headlines — has destroyed a successful Canadian company, an international force for Canadian culture and temperament, brought to its knees by America.

But it’s not Hurtig, an amiable if middling hero of the left, known more for relying on government grants to publish than for actually making any money at it. It’s Black, an unapologetic conservative. And that has made all the difference.

It is tempting for many to wish Black the worst for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of his case. Too much discussion of Black’s trial has been coloured by the professional rivalries of other journalists and publishers; or ideological rivalries of leftist political partisans; or business rivalries of competing investors. That’s too bad.

It is precisely defendants like Black, who so irritate the left, for whom liberals must insist on the dispassionate application of the rule of law. For whatever precedents are set in a political frenzy today lie in wait for another defendant tomorrow. Probably not Hurtig — he’s not doing any big deals lately. Someone less pugnacious, with fewer resources to defend himself, for whom Canadian legal support will actually be needed.

Is there anyone of us who, if our worst moments were secretly caught on tape (and then edited to make them especially unappealling), would come across much better than Mel Gibson did?

I know; Gibson salted his rants with racial epithets. And we know that his critics would never do that -- they're as polite in private, when think they're off the record, as they are in public when they're accepting an Academy Award. Promise!

I wouldn't want to be spoken to the way Gibson allegedly spoke to his ex. But I am also equally sure about what's going on here: a gold-digger on par with Paul McCartney's ex, Heather Mills, is trying to extract her tens of millions from Gibson.

Here's my Sun column on the subject. P.S. If you haven't seen Gibson's movie Apocalypto, you are missing something incredible. I've seen it three times and would see it again.

Eavesdropping on someone else’s domestic arguments is in bad taste. But when purported recordings of actor Mel Gibson shouting at his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, hit the Internet last week, millions of Gibson’s fans couldn’t resist listening in as the Oscar winner who played Mad Max, Hamlet and William Wallace let loose his profanity-laced tirades.

Of course such anger is unappealing; of course his sexist and racist flourishes are to be denounced; and of course his dark hints of actually hurting his ex — such as burning down the house — are appalling, though they seem to have been for dramatic effect.

One can only imagine how Quentin Tarantino, whose fevered mind gave us such profane shocks as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, argues when he’s really mad. And we don’t need much imagining to picture Al Pacino — who played ruthless roles in Scarface and the Godfather — blowing his stack.

Grigorieva probably had to put up with plenty of such rants during the course of her brief relationship with Gibson. And just as surely, before she even shacked up with the billionaire, she knew like the rest of us did that Gibson had a penchant for profanity with a mean edge.

Grigorieva’s lawyers claim the conversations she meticulously recorded were not leaked to the media by her. But all of this is in the middle of a legal battle over the custody of the couple’s young child‚ and the millions of dollars of payments that Grigorieva hopes to extract from Gibson. A $20-million figure has been floated, which would be more per-minute than Paul McCartney paid to Heather Mills for their relationship.

But then it’s a lot harder to imagine Sir Paul using the C-word to describe his ex.

But besides the drama, there are two serious questions. Is Gibson a racist, as his use of racial epithets would suggest? And does he restrict his offences to the verbal, or is he physically abusive, too?

One definition of being a racist is saying racist things, and Gibson has certainly done that. But other than shocking punctuation marks for his arguments, is he serious?

Gibson has no aversion to working with minority actors such as Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon series and Tina Turner in Mad Max. In 2006, he directed Apocalypto, a movie that featured only aboriginal actors, who spoke in an ancient Mayan dialect. The effort won Gibson a raft of prizes, including from Latino and aboriginal advocacy groups, not to mention three Oscar nominations.

Gibson might say racist things to hurt someone when he’s mad, and that’s not OK. But the bulk of his life’s work speaks of cross-cultural understanding.

But what about the menacing aspects of his calls? Is he violent? If so, the man should be charged with the serious crime of spousal assault.

But Grigorieva never made such a complaint to police or the public until the custody hearing.

Gibson’s reputation is tarnished by these tapes, as it should be. But the establishment denunciation of him seems stronger than for other celebrities in a similar position.

Alec Baldwin left abusive phone messages directed toward his daughter; he’s the toast of the Emmys. Christian Bale was recorded freaking out on tape; he’s never been hotter in Hollywood. Again, that’s just about shouting and swearing. What about real violence?

Director Roman Polanski drugged and raped a teenager, and fled the U.S. to avoid trial; Hollywood has made him a saint, and given him no end of prizes and tributes. Charlie Sheen shot girlfriend Kelly Preston in the arm, threatened wife Denise Richards with assault and was charged with assaulting third wife Brooke Mueller.

But Baldwin, Polanski and Sheen are perfect liberals; Gibson is a Christian conservative. So Sheen was signed to do two more seasons of Two and a Half Men at nearly $2 million per episode. Gibson’s agency dropped him.

Gibson doesn’t need expensive rehab or anger management to get his career back. He just needs a $10 membership in Obama’s re-election campaign.

Read this out-take from Ignatieff's bus tour.

Let us put aside, for a moment, the strangeness of Ignatieff using a rural bus tour to announce arts funding (clearly the man went off script). Instead of focusing on the substance, let's look at how the man talks when he's "connecting" to "real people". What does he talk about?

You tell me what he's really talking about. Here are Ignatieff's verbatim quotes from the story:

“It’s personal. People think I spent my life up there in the ivory tower,” Ignatieff told about 100 Liberals gathered on Wednesday in Kingston for lunch with the leader.

“I actually spent 20 years as a freelance writer and journalist. I wrote screenplays. I wrote a couple of films. I lived by my wits. The writing life is a world of six-month contracts, Ignatieff explained, “and that’s the reality of life for many in the arts community in Canada.

“For 20 years I lived six months at a time. No safety net. No pension. No coverage. That’s the life of an artist, he said. I lived the insecurities of it, I lived the thrill of it. The thrill of being your own master. I lived the thrill of reaching an audience with no help from anyone except for what was coming out of my pen. I understand this world. I understand its risks; I understand its perils.”

...“At critical points in my development as a writer, the Canada Council was there for me. It must be there for all Canadians,” Ignatieff said. “At critical points in my career, I made television documentaries for the CBC. I made radio documentaries for the CBC. The spinal column of public culture in this country is a well-funded and sustainable public broadcaster.”

What's that -- 20 I's and me's in four paragraphs?

He wasn't talking about the arts. He was talking about himself.

When he's off-the-cuff, as he obviously was here, it truly shines through. But even in his scripted, planned speeches, the man just can't stop talking about himself, as if no fact or argument or event is valid without somehow first passing through him. I refer to his recent speech at a Beijing University. The speech was appaling for its moral equivalence -- he actually says China and Canada can learn from each other about human rights and justice. But just as strange is his personal obsessions: he starts out by talking about how his great-grandfather had helped enslave China many years ago. That's literally the first thing he talks about. No speechwriter would have put that in -- that's Ignatieff insisting on making every damned thing about himself.

These are not personal tics that can be unlearned easily. This is hard-wired into his personality. Don't think his self-regard has gone unnoticed -- in fact is has been his most consistent message this past year.

Read this out-take from Ignatieff's bus tour.

Let us put aside, for a moment, the strangeness of Ignatieff using a rural bus tour to announce arts funding (clearly the man went off script). Instead of focusing on the substance, let's look at how the man talks when he's "connecting" to "real people". What does he talk about?

You tell me what he's really talking about. Here are Ignatieff's verbatim quotes from the story:

“It’s personal. People think I spent my life up there in the ivory tower,” Ignatieff told about 100 Liberals gathered on Wednesday in Kingston for lunch with the leader.

“I actually spent 20 years as a freelance writer and journalist. I wrote screenplays. I wrote a couple of films. I lived by my wits. The writing life is a world of six-month contracts, Ignatieff explained, “and that’s the reality of life for many in the arts community in Canada.

“For 20 years I lived six months at a time. No safety net. No pension. No coverage. That’s the life of an artist, he said. I lived the insecurities of it, I lived the thrill of it. The thrill of being your own master. I lived the thrill of reaching an audience with no help from anyone except for what was coming out of my pen. I understand this world. I understand its risks; I understand its perils.”

...“At critical points in my development as a writer, the Canada Council was there for me. It must be there for all Canadians,” Ignatieff said. “At critical points in my career, I made television documentaries for the CBC. I made radio documentaries for the CBC. The spinal column of public culture in this country is a well-funded and sustainable public broadcaster.”

What's that -- 20 I's and me's in four paragraphs?

He wasn't talking about the arts. He was talking about himself.

When he's off-the-cuff, as he obviously was here, it truly shines through. But even in his scripted, planned speeches, the man just can't stop talking about himself, as if no fact or argument or event is valid without somehow first passing through him. I refer to his recent speech at a Beijing University. The speech was appaling for its moral equivalence -- he actually says China and Canada can learn from each other about human rights and justice. But just as strange is his personal obsessions: he starts out by talking about how his great-grandfather had helped enslave China many years ago. That's literally the first thing he talks about. No speechwriter would have put that in -- that's Ignatieff insisting on making every damned thing about himself.

These are not personal tics that can be unlearned easily. This is hard-wired into his personality. Don't think his self-regard has gone unnoticed -- in fact is has been his most consistent message this past year.

The first letter of apology has been issued by Random House's New York head office, as a result of Marci McDonald's countless errors in her bigoted book The Armageddon Factor.

Most of her factual errors are not defamatory, they're just embarrassing to McDonald, who proved she really wasn't ready to write a book about Canadian politics. But some of her errors were defamatory, such as her allegation that Terry O'Neill concealed a conflict of interest when he wrote about an advocacy group.

I know that most people who were smeared by McDonald aren't likely to go to the time and expense of hiring a lawyer; but O'Neill did, and Random House's response shows that they are clearly worried about the editorial integrity of the book, and potential legal liability.

It's an embarrassing end to long career for McDonald.

As I've written before, watching the mainstream media criticize Quebecor's proposed SUN TV news channel is like a Rorschach Test: given that the proposed channel hasn't broadcast a single minute yet, the criticisms are more a window into the minds of the critics than they are a comment on SUN TV.

Take James Travers' latest in the Toronto Star. I won't go through it all, but let me show you a few sentences:

To be as provocative as Kory Teneycke promises, opinion shows on the 24-hour news channel must pander to extremes. Politically toxic opinions that Teneycke helped the Prime Minister defuse as his chief spokesman will be lint to TV Velcro.

Fringe elements will delight in having a nightly forum for rants about, say, abortion, bilingualism, the supposed climate change hoax and getting Ottawa out of their lives.

Regardless of your own views on the subjects of abortion, bilingualism, climate change and inobtrusive government, to call one side of those debates (and Travers means the conservative side) a "fringe element" or "extremist" is ridiculous. Let's take them one at a time.

1. While abortion may be politically sacrosanct to the Star (and unlikely to change in Parliament any time soon) it is hardly a matter that has been resolved in the minds of mere citizens. Canada's abortion laws -- abortion on demand, for any reason or no reason, from conception until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers -- is the most liberal in the world, and was the result of a legislative failure (a tie vote in the Senate), not any political compromise. This fairly well-footnoted compendium shows that while public opinion in Canada does not favour criminalizing or banning abortions, a very significant minority, and sometimes even a plurality of Canadians, could be characterized as pro-life to varying degrees.
2. On bilingualism, we see the same thing: this footnoted compendium of polls shows that while Canadians support the abstract notion of bilingualism (who could be against that?) a large number, and indeed often a majority, of Canadians oppose government policies of forced bilingualism (Anglo support fell as low as 32% in the mid-1990s).
3. Without spending more than a moment looking, the first poll I found about Canadian attitudes towards global warming shows that 58% of Canadians believe it's a fact. That's higher than I thought it would be (the U.S. number is 41% and only 38% of people in the UK believe in it) but it's still barely half.
4. I'm not even going to search for polls about "getting Ottawa out of your life", but I think any normal Canadian -- even NDP voters, and certainly Bloc voters -- would say "damn right" if asked about it. Even most supporters of the abstraction of big government know that a distant and partisan government is less effective and accountable than a close-by and responsive government. I'd bet that if such a slanted wording were ever poll-tested, close to 90% of Canadians would say they'd want less Ottawa in their lives.

This is what I mean by a Rorshach Test: James Travers has told us nothing about the world and certainly nothing about SUN TV. But he has told us a hell of a lot about himself and his paper the Star. He thinks that the conservative view of these issues is extremist; fringe; tiny; politically toxic; and most importantly, inappropriate for any media to pay attention to.

In a media monopoly, disparaging readers (read: potential customers) like that has no downside. Where is the "fringe" going to go?

The Sun chain of newspapers and the National Post has provided an answer on the newspaper side, and the Internet has provided countless other sources of news and opinion for those who are shut out by the likes of Travers.

But the advent of SUN TV is so troubling to Travers precisely because it promises to be so mainstream; it's not a U.S.-based website like the Drudge Report; it's not a small, underfunded conservative magazine like the old Western Standard that I used to publish was. It will be on TV, just like CBC and CTV. Now the "fringe" has a place to go.

I think Travers is actually scared of SUN TV. One thing's for sure: he sure can't stop talking about it.

Here's an op-ed that I wrote about Omar Khadr for the Sun newspapers. Instead of the junior high yearbook photo that most media use (it was provided to them by Khadr's mother -- seriously), here are a few photos I prefer for their accuracy and relevance:

Here's my Op-Ed from today's National Post, on Michael Ignatieff's repulsive speech in Beijing:

Speaking false praise to power

Michael Ignatieff used to take a tough line on China's dictatorship -- not surprising for a former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University.

In a 2005 lecture to Amnesty Ireland, Ignatieff made a short list of countries that he called human rights "outliers" and he named just three: Libya, North Korea and China. That's tantamount to calling China a rogue state.

Even after he became an MP in 2006, Ignatieff spoke sternly of China's lack of basic freedoms, telling the Georgia Strait that, if he could, he would ask the Chinese government, "Do you really want to build your prosperity on slavery?" And as recently as this year he told Calgary students that Canada must speak out against human rights violations, nomatterwherethey happen. "Just because China is big and powerful doesn't mean that Canada should back down on this issue."

This weekend the Liberal leader finally had his chance to speak truth to power on his official visit to China. But the Ignatieff who spoke to a carefully-screened group of Chinese students at Tsinghua University bore no resemblance to the Ignatieff who spent decades promotinghumanrights in speeches, books and as a professor.

In his speech, Ignatieff told his hosts, "We must be ready to speak plainly with one another about human rights." But he didn't. He made no mention of China's lack of democratic freedoms such as free elections and freedom of speech and the press, or its brutal treatment of ethnic minorities from the Tibetans to the Uyghurs. The only human rights track record he criticized was Canada's -- Ignatieff told his foreign audience that "I am not blind to the gap that exists between our ideals and reality for some of my fellow citizens."

Canada is a vibrant democracy with a heritage of freedom that dates back to the Magna Carta. It is a refuge for millions of people who have crossed oceans to be here -- including many refugees from China's own brutality. The way we respect ethnic minorities is best symbolized in our two most recent Governors-General. And yet the only "gap" Ignatieff saw fit to mention at Tsinghua was our own.

This fits well with Chinese government propaganda, but perhaps upon his return to Canada, Ignatieff might elaborate on our Canadian human rights violations to a more critical audience.

Disparaging Canada overseas is a sign of weakness. But Ignatieff's most bizarre comment was much more dangerous: He said China and Canada can "learn from each other in matters of rights, justice, civil service reform and corporate social responsibility."

Pardon?

It's easy to imagine China being able to learn from us about these things -- and it's easy to understand why the Communist Party hasn't chosen to do so. But how does Ignatieff think that Canada might learn from China on the matter of rights or justice? Does he really think that China's state capitalism -- a system of corruption, cronyism and routinely-violated property rights -- is something that we can learn from here, other than as a bad example to avoid? Civil service reform is a strange item to add to that list, but again, what exactly does Ignatieff see in China's bloated, corrupt, backwards civil service that he'd like to emulate here?

Ignatieff heaps false praise on China, saying its newfound prosperity -- for at least part of the country -- "has been one of the most significant advances in human rights for mankind ever." A higher standard of living is indeed a good thing. But what

does that have to do with human rights like the freedom to criticize the government, or to organize a political rally, or to believe in a religion that doesn't have the Communist Party's approval? Is Ignatieff really comparing China's material wealth -- at $10/day, their per capita GDP is still quite modest by international levels -- to the freedoms protected in the Magna Carta or the American Revolution or the Enlightenment?

Ignatieff falsely disparaged Canada's human rights achievements. HefalselylaudedChina's human rights achievements. And then he falsely implied a moral equivalence between our two countries -- that we are moral equals, and can learn from each other about matters like justice.

The Chinese students Ignatieff spoke to have to parrot such pro-China propaganda -- they have no choice. But what excuse does Michael Ignatieff have -- a man whose public work for thirty years proves that he knows better?

Yesterday Fox News Channel aired a one-hour Fourth of July special. One of the segments was on freedom of speech, and John Stossel, the host of the show, interviewed me for it. Here's the segment as it aired. What do you think?

This Pulitzer Prize shoo-in by Frances Russell tells an interesting story.

Russell was writing about SUN TV, the proposed all-news channel by Quebecor. She starts:

The plot for Fox News North, the tag applied to Quebecor's new Sun Media news channel, was hatched at a lunch Prime Minister Stephen Harper had with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York on March 30, 2009, according to The Canadian Press.

Australian media billionaire Murdoch owns Fox News; Ailes, a brass-knuckle Republican strategist, is its president.

Huh? I read that Canadian Press article. (I can't find it in online; so here's a .pdf of it). It does report that Harper met with Murdoch and Ailes. But it does not say that the idea for SUN TV came from that meeting. In fact, the Canadian Press story specifically states that the subject was not raised.

So it's not true. And it's still not true, even though Russell says it's true "according to The Canadian Press".

Russell gets her facts wrong in the very next paragraph, too. She attributes an apocryphal story about Roger Ailes to Time magazine. Um, nope. It was the New York Times. Time magazine, New York Times -- it's so easy to get confused. Good thing Russell isn't presenting herself as an expert on the media, or on accurate and balanced reporting.

The rest of Russell's rant is weird too -- for example, she later writes the opposite of her lede sentence. That's just bizarre. Isn't that the kind of debate in her mind that should happen before she files her story? Did her editor at the Winnipeg Free Press even read the column through to the end before slapping it on the page?

As I wrote before, SUN TV is a great Rorschach Test for the mainstream media. Since it hasn't broadcast a minute of programming yet, anyone who condemns it exposes their prejudice -- literally, to pre-judge something. The smarter liberals in the media are holding their fire. But the dumber ones just can't resist taking pot-shots.

Reading Russell's rant reminded me of the unpleasant 90 minutes I spent reading Marci McDonald's book. The factual errors were irritating, but they were secondary to the larger flaw: the bigotry of the author's thesis.

In McDonald's case, her hatred for Christians was far more important than her countless factual errors. Same thing with Russell. Put aside her poor reportorial skills, and the non-existent fact-checking by her editors. Far more interesting is Russell's left-wing conspiracy theories and her intolerance and hostility towards anyone who doesn't agree with her views.

P.S. Just for disclosure, I do not have a contract with SUN TV (or any other TV channel).