canada

This is so not okay. RCMP in Kamloops, B.C. tasered an 82-year-old man in his hospital bed to subdue him so they could get “more important work to do on the street tonight.”

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You can see pictures of the burn marks on Lasser’s body on the CBC article. In fairness, it appears that he became delusional and pulled a knife, and wouldn’t let go of it after police showed up. But for goshsakes, there’s got to be better ways to deal with this than overreacting by tasering an 82-year-old hospital patient. This is the kind of thing that kills elderly Polish immigrants who can’t speak English. It’s gone on way too long.

Hat-tip: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon

• Turkey reforms a controversial law prohibiting insulting “Turkishness”, but the reforms may not go far enough.
• E911 mistakenly sends help to Toronto rather than Calgary. Someone dies.
• In Israel, an Orthodox backlash against ultra-Orthodox domination of civil and religious institutions.
• Israel provides medical care to sick and injured Palestinians from Gaza. A bit of a bright spot in the middle of swirling chaos.
• A substitute teacher claims that accusations of wizardry cost him his job.
• The New York Times discovers (in the Fashion and Style section, naturally) that transgendered spouses face legal challenges in the United States. Feministe has some interesting and important reactions.
• Gas Tax Spam:
  

  If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a “GAS TAX HOLIDAY”. You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

Real posting resuming soon! Thanks for the holiday, internet.

Yet another hilarious example of government waste, this time from Natural Resources Canada. Apparently its wireless and mobile communications spending is way out of control. The CBC is reporting on a recent audit which has discovered that the lack of oversight in this government agency is so bad that they could not even provide an inventory of all the BlackBerries and mobile phones they own. This one department is costing taxpayers half a million dollars per year. Multiply that by dozens more government departments, and that’s one huge hell of a waste.

Among the particulars of this audit that I find so amusing: employees made their own contracts with the phone companies, resulting in a patchwork of over 1500 individual contracts, 20% of all the devices were owned by people who had no reason for owning one in their job, and the department in question had no procedures to recover the cost when an employee used a government-provided mobile device for personal matters.

This is a perfect example of what happens when laws and government policies are too slow to catch up to actual practice. It’s a shame that an audit—probably costing the taxpayers the equivalent of a year of wireless services for Natural Resources Canada—had to be conducted as the first step on the road (hopefully) to eliminating some of this waste. No surprises here, and I bet that nobody’s going to raise the issue in today’s Question Period because they’ll be too busy benefitting from government waste elsewhere.

If you ask Google Maps to calculate directions between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario—the only point where you go due south to enter Canada from the United States—and then ask for directions via public transportation, here’s what you get:

And here’s what you get if you reverse those directions:

There are, of course bus services operated by both cities’ transportation systems, naturally. I am uncertain as to whether you can walk through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, though.

In an effort to appeal to Canada’s large and growing Chinese population, the CBC has started to broadcast hockey games in Mandarin:

There’s no word for hockey puck in Mandarin.

So Jason Wang, who’s been calling the Montreal-Boston series of the NHL playoffs in his native Chinese language for the CBC - a first for the public broadcaster - just uses the Mandarin word for ball.

It’s one of the many hockey terms Wang has had to translate and in some cases make up as he calls the games for a Chinese audience. He says it’s no easy task.

“Especially in hockey, where Chinese culture doesn’t have a context for it, so I have to translate a lot of the terms, all the penalty calls, and sometimes I have to borrow from other sports,” says Wang, sitting in the small recording booth at the CBC building in Vancouver where he calls the games while watching them on a large TV.

This appears to be a textbook example of translation involving cultural compatibility issues. There are many words and phrases that can’t simply be translated but which exert influence on the patters of idiom in a certain cultural context. Hockey in Canada is a perfect example. Consider this exchange during Question Period in the House of Commons the other day:

KEN DRYDEN (Liberal, York Centre): Mr. Speaker, with every scandal around him, the Prime Minister can pretend—

VARIOUS MEMBERS: Oh, oh!

SPEAKER: Order, order. This is question period, not a hockey game. We are hearing now a question from the honourable member for York Centre and we have to be able to hear the question. Order, please. …

DRYDEN: Last week [James Moore, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services] talked about something else he was almost too young to know. Pull the goalie? This is April. I do not get pulled.

JAMES MOORE: Mr. Speaker, he says he does not get pulled. He pulled himself on every confidence vote in the House of Commons. He did not show up. Again, I know 1972 was a fond year for my colleague from York Centre, and 1974 may be a fond one for him as well with the Nixon administration, but the reality is that we have spoken the truth. We have stood up and have consistently voted in the best interests of Canadians. The member for York Centre can sit there and sulk, and slowly skate to the bench as he sits there and does nothing for Canadians.

Devoid of a context in which hockey is part of the cultural discourse and the speakers can count on their interlocutors understanding and correctly processing these metaphors, this exchange makes much less sense. It can probably still be understood, but some of the flavour would be lost. The task of the translator, then, is not simply to translate the words, but to translate the cultural context as well.

I wish I spoke Mandarin so I could really understand the nuances of this process. And I wonder how the Chinese Ice Hockey Association and Chinese ice hockey teams, like the China Sharks, deal with these issues. Anybody who knows more than I about Chinese, hockey, or Chinese hockey, is encouraged to contribute!

A couple of interesting tabs I’ve had floating around in my browser for the past couple of days, to slake your thirst for the time being, but hopefully whet your appetite as regards the future—all right, I’m done:

• From Failed Messiah: Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel: Real Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t abuse children; child abuse is a problem only among ba’alei teshuvah (naturalized ultra-Orthodox Jews). Reason? Haredi children don’t call their teachers by their first names.
• From the Slog: University of Washington College Republicans are holding an odious and racist event on Tuesday: ‘Find an Illegal Immigrant Tag’. Stated purpose: ‘to send a a “clear statement that we need to get serious and crack down on illegal immigration and secure our borders.”’ Unstated purpose: to be huge white-privilege racist dicks.
• From The Province: A good summary of the problems surrounding this year’s Vaisakhi parade and festivities in Surrey, B.C. A what point does it stop being a family-friendly religious celebration and start being political, especially when you throw photographs of Sikh men who committed violent terrorist attacks against Indians in support of a Sikh homeland into the mix?
• Finally, from the Onion:
  
  

  

  Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook

  The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.

Across Canada, people protested the recent decisions by the CBC to axe the only remaining radio orchestra in North America and change the character of Radio Two away from classical music as a major focus. At the protest in Vancouver, about three hundred people showed up: this was the biggest turnout in Canada, but this is, after all, the city that is the home base of the CBC Radio Orchestra. Many important people in the Canadian music scene—not just strictly classical music—were there to address the crowd and lead us in very well-tuned protest songs and anthems and chants.

The full album of pictures is here (I’m slowly migrating my photo software to Plogger). Here are some ‘best of’ hits:

Also, check out Adam Abrams’ blog post, with which I express my complete agreement, as well as his photo album from the event. Also, if you have Facebook, check out the event page for the nationwide protests, as well as the Facebook groups for classical music at the CBC and for the CBC Radio Orchestra. Also make sure to check out the web site for Stand on Guard for CBC.

The last remaining radio orchestra in North America, the Vancouver-based CBC Radio Orchestra, will be disbanded after 70 years. From the CBC:

The decision to disband the orchestra—formed in 1938 when radio orchestras were common—comes down to dollars and cents, a CBC executive in Vancouver said Thursday.

“We know for example that for a concert that we fund through our CBC Radio Orchestra, we can extend our reach to three by doing it through other musical organizations,” said Jennifer McGuire, executive director of CBC English Radio.

In other words, it’s too expensive to fund classical music, since nobody listens to it except old fogies and you can’t compete with the private sector that way. Needless to say, this decision has many people—not least the musicians—ticked off. From today’s Globe and Mail:

“It is a travesty that this decision has been made. It’s a travesty that the government continues to cut the funding to the CBC. But it is also a travesty that bureaucrats that occupy the top echelons of radio don’t have the guts to stand up for this orchestra,” said violist Andrew Brown as he emerged from the meeting, receiving an impromptu standing ovation from other musicians who had gathered in the hotel’s lobby.

“Just bafflegab,” said Brian G’froerer, who has played principal horn with the orchestra for 30 years, when asked how CBC executives Jennifer McGuire and Mark Steinmetz had responded to the musicians’ concerns inside the meeting.

This weekend I had a terrifically long conversation with my mother about the British North America Act, the precise nature of the relationship between Canada and Great Britain (read: the United Kingdom) and the Commonwealth of Nations, and the proper name for the country. The last common one that I know of is ‘Dominion of Canada’, but I haven’t heard anybody ever refer to it that way—at least not ironically. Of course, the country is referred to as a ‘dominion’ in a number of different contexts even today, yet by and large these are archaic, such as, perhaps most famously, the third verse of the original text of ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’:

Our fair Dominion now extends from Cape Race to Nootka Sound,
May peace forever be our lot and plenteous store abound,
And may those ties of love be ours which discord cannot sever,
And flourish green o’er freedom’s home the Maple Leaf forever!

But as far as most people who live here are concerned, I believe, the name of the country is simply ‘Canada’. However, on landing at YVR today, I was officially welcomed by the (Los Angeles-based) flight crew to some place called the ‘Republic of Canada‘, much to the amusement of about 75% of the plane. I suspect that this is not the short-lived Republic of Canada from the 19th century, but rather some magical mystical country without a Queen and an absurdly long list of successors.

I am absolutely stunned by this story. It’s like something out of a deranged episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Oy Vey. Except much darker. From the Canadian Jewish News:

An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.

Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.

Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …

The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …

Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …

Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.

Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”

The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”

And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:

Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.

There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.

(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)

This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.

Today in Toronto, Stéphane Dion extolled the gains the Liberals made in yesterday’s byeletions, despite the fact that such gains were rather thin. The Liberals took two seats in Toronto handily, both with former leadership candidates running. They squeaked by to take a third seat in Vancouver by 151 votes, and lost a fourth in Saskatchewan to the Conservatives. Yet Dion still sees this as a smashing victory:

“Yesterday has been a very good day for Liberals,” Mr. Dion announced at a Toronto news conference.

Okay, sure, that’s where the spin is going, I see that. But it gets crazier:

Mr. Dion seemed particularly pleased about the win in Vancouver Quadra, B.C., where former provincial environment minister and onetime tree planter Joyce Murray took the vote, despite heavy losses to the Green Party.

Conceding that “the main point in Quadra has been the Green vote,” he dismissed suggestions the increase in Green support was a concern for the Liberals, who have sought to distinguish their environmental policies as more far-sighted than the Conservatives’.

Just have another look at those numbers from yesterday’s elections returns. The Liberals scored 36% of the vote, down from 49% when they last took the riding in 2006. Meanwhile the NDP and Greens took 13–14% of the vote each. The whole platform of the Greens has been that neither the Liberals’ nor the Conservatives’ positions on climate change and the environment were far-sighted or aggressive enough enough. Joyce Murray’s laughable assertion that ‘The public has spoken and it’s about the environment’, as we discussed on Monday, is flatly contradicted by the polling numbers. When 13% of the voters choose the Green Party over yours, you can bet your boots it’s about the environment. Just not in the way you think.

The Liberals saw their share of the vote in Vancouver Quadra fall to 36% from 49% in the 2006 election, despite devoting weeks in the House of Commons to questions on the Cadman affair, which the party hoped would resonate in the riding.

Oh, so that explains why the Liberal leadership have been wasting time during each and every Question Period to asking the same questions and getting the same non-answers from Harper and Moore and other Conservatives about the Cadman affair. I’d wondered about that: why were they letting the Bloc Québécois and the NDP ask real question about real matters, such as NAFTA-gate or, y’know, the environment. These then end up looking like pet political issues because the official ‘opposition’—if the Liberals truly deserve that moniker—won’t take them up. Instead, they devote their time to making the Conservatives repeat the same half-truths about ‘financial considerations’ because they think this will resound in Vancouver Quadra.

Well, the Cadman affair didn’t resound in Vancouver on Monday. The environment did.

A mock political advertisement from this week’s edition of the Rick Mercer Report on CBC. (Again, the transcription is mine, as is the addition of hyperlinks.):

[The scene: a father reading a newspaper, talking to his son of about ten years.]
Billy: Dad, why is Stephen Harper suing Stéphane Dion?
Dad: Well, Billy, the Prime Minister had no choice but to sue Stéphane Dion. Mr. Dion said some pretty nasty things about him.
Billy: But he’s the Leader of the Opposition. Isn’t it his job to do that?
Dad: To a point. But if you damage someone’s reputation, well, then that’s libel.
Billy: But what about Dion’s reputation? Harper ran all those ads saying he’s not a leader. He looked like a total tool.
Dad: Yes, yes he did. But that’s not libel.
Billy: Why not?
Dad: Well, if it were, Mr. Dion would sue Mr. Harper.
Billy: Oh.
Dad: You see, Billy, suing people makes Stephen Harper feel good inside. Like when you score a goal in hockey.
Billy: Is that why he’s also suing Ralph Goodale, and Michael Igna…
Dad: Ignatieff. I believe it’s Russian. Always sue everyone, Billy, remember that.
Billy: Thanks, Dad.
Dad: Take no prisoners, Billy. [The two of them high-five.]
[Shot of Parliament at night, with inset of Harper.]
Voice over: Stephen Harper is bringing change to Ottawa. Strengthening democracy. Through lawsuits.
[Back to scene of home.]
Billy: [whining] Dad, Stephen Harper’s suing me now!
Dad: Well, it’s your own fault, Billy. You asked too many darn questions. Should have kept your mouth shut.
Billy: [Grunts, falls backward onto couch.]
[Conservative Party logo.]
Voice over: The Conservative Party of Canada. Consider yourself warned.

You can watch the original video here (season 5, episode 18, second item: ‘Mercer: Consider yourself warned’).

The Canadian government is cracking down on Internet scams offering a miracle cure for cancer. Now, if only they (and allied governments) would go after Hasidic rabbis with quack cures for the same:

The websites advertise medicines, herbal remedies, other supplements and treatment regimes of questionable value. It’s impossible to know how much money has been lost to bogus claims, but the amount could be huge. Health information is the third-most-searched topic online. An estimated 8.7 million Canadians are turning to the Internet for medical advice, but only one-third actually talk to their doctors about what they found online, according to Statistics Canada.

By taking decisive action against scammers who trick unsuspecting cancer victims into paying millions of dollars for snake oil, the Conservative government in Ottawa is showing its resolve to crack down on people unfairly and illegally taking the money of innocent people afflicted with cancer. Unless, of course, the cancer victims in question are independent MPs whose votes they’re trying to buy in order to bring down the government…

The final numbers in Vancouver Quadra from Elections Canada are in, with all 237 polls reporting:

Turnout was abysmal: 28,165 of 83,121—a mere 33.9%—of registered electors voted. Still, this is a higher turnout than any of the three other elections held today, none of which even hit 28%.

Joyce Murray takes the seat for the Liberals, but by a margin of only 151 votes. This is a stunning result because the seat was considered so safe for the Liberals, even with many voters expected to vote for the NDP and the Greens, thus causing a spoiler effect. Furthermore, the counting showed a clear and consistent lead for Joyce Murray right up until the end. As this CBC article makes clear, the election was called before the results got really close, and the celebration was a hair’s breadth from being premature.

Murray said Monday night’s victory in Vancouver, and Liberal wins in byelections in Toronto, will make the Liberal Party more effective in holding Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper accountable in the next weeks and months.

“The public has spoken and it’s about the environment,” she said, promising to be a tireless advocate for the reduction of greenhouse gases and to push for social housing for those in need.

Yeah, not quite—if the Liberals had owned the environment issue, 28% of voters wouldn’t have voted for the NDP or the Greens. As I pointed out in my previous post, this should send a stunning message to Stéphane Dion and the Liberal leadership. The fact that over 28% of voters who might have voted for the Liberals did not do so stands for a stunning repudiation of the Liberal Party. There are a zillion issues on which he and his party appear not to have connected with voters, especially here in liberal (small l) Vancouver, B.C. The environment. Government transparency. Western alienation. The opposition’s failure to be effective against the ruling Conservatives in Parliament. These combine to give enormous appeal to parties like the NDP, and especially the Green Party, which finished only 0.2% behind the NDP in Toronto Centre.

Here’s another good quote from Joyce Murray:

“Tonight we are sending a very clear message to Stephen Harper: The Liberals are strong.”

The Liberals’ failure to own any of these issues—especially the environment, which Murray cited as the reason she won so, er, resoundingly and convincingly—is spoken to by the huge percentages of the vote being split by the NDP and the Green Party. If the Liberals are smart, they’ll take these issues far more seriously in the future, especially before they plunge the country into another federal election. Losing a seat in Saskatchewan to the Conservatives is a blow—not a huge one, but a noticeable one nonetheless. Coming within 151 votes of losing in Vancouver Quadra, a heretofore reliable Liberal riding in the wealthy heart of the Vancouver west side, is a victory, but only in a narrow technical sense. Today, the Liberals did not demonstrate that they ‘are strong’, in Joyce Murray’s words. This victory is one that must make the party leadership sit up, take notice, and take a good hard look inside themselves.

Four seats, all previously held by Liberals, were being contested in today’s Federal by-elections. The news media are reporting that the Liberal Party has won three out of four: two in Toronto and one in Vancouver. All three of these seats were considered fairly safe Liberal territory. The fourth riding of Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, elected the Conservative candidate Rob Clarke. There was a significant Nader effect in the Saskatchewan and Vancouver races: exact numbers are not yet available, but the latest data from Elections Canada seems to indicate that the results could have come out differently if the NDP and Green totals could have been added to the Liberal total. (One of these days, I’ll shut up about the single transferable vote system. But not today.)

Basically, these election results allow all sides to claim (read: spin) victory. The Liberals can claim that three out of four is a good hold, they held on to traditionally Liberal territory, this election sends a clear message to Harper’s government that people are fed up with its lack of transparency and distance from the common people, and is a good recovery from the Liberals’ failure during the by-elections in Québec last year. The Conservatives can claim that the Saskatchewan pickup is a vindication of their policies and their government, the Liberals should have run the table because the candidate there was hand-picked by Stéphane Dion, and if the people were really so fed up with the Conservatives, the Liberals should have picked up the seat. The NDP and Greens can claim, especially with the very high numbers they received in Vancouver Quadra and Toronto Centre, that both major parties are flawed and incompetent. For my part, I think Stéphane Dion really needs to take a long, hard look at himself and his leadership of the party.

More on this later. Analysis and actual numbers when Elections Canada finishes counting the votes, and I (and the rest of the country) have had a chance to sleep on it all.

There are several by-elections happening all over Canada today, including one in Vancouver Quadra. The riding is considered to be very safe Liberal territory, but party leader Stéphane Dion and deputy leader Michael Ignatieff (remember, the ones that the PM is suing) came out here to forestall fears that low turnout could harm elections results. The NDP candidate Rebecca Coad is a UBC student in philosophy; I met her some time ago, and she seemed pretty on the ball. The Green candidate, Dan Grice, is a UBC graduate in classical archaeology, which I think is fantastic. The Georgia Straight endorsed him, reasoning that they could not endorse the NDP candidate because of systemic problems with the NDP, the Conservative candidate didn’t even bother to show up to debates and meetings, and the riding is safe Liberal territory anyway, so people could be safe and vote their conscience to send a message to the Liberals about what issues they’d like to see on the party agenda. I think this is not a bad strategy, provided that it doesn’t skew the elections results, as Dion and the party leadership are obviously afraid of. Of course, if elections were held in accordance with an alternative system such as Single Transferable Vote, as I have argued, people could vote for the Green or NDP candidate to vote their conscience and send a message, and then mark the Liberal candidate as their second choice, thereby voting both ideologically and practically.

Anyway, I’ll have some updates later in the day about the results of the by-elections. Look for the Liberals to make a few pickups, especially in urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto, due to dissatisfaction with the current government. Meanwhile, a few interesting links:

• How do you prove you’re gay when applying for refugee status?
• Religious groups are trying to shut down a Russian television channel because they show programming that is ‘anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality’, such as South Park.
• The hilarious malapropisms of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, such as ‘I deny the allegations and the allegators.’

I have long thought that the Pacific Northwest (i.e. Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and some of northern California) possesses the most ridiculous place names of anywhere in North America (and possibly the world). Much of this is a product of local Native languages, as it is all over North America, but some of it is just human silliness. Some of the pronunciations are reasonable (enough), but some are maddeningly unintuitive and therefore—rightly or wrongly—employed as shibboleths to identify ‘true’ PNWers from everybody else (mostly Californians, even those who moved to the area years ago and are now locals).

If I’ve left anything off this list that you feel merits inclusion in such a, uh, worthy list, please leave it in a comment.

Silly-sounding place names

• Agassiz, BC (pronounced ag-uh-SEE)
• Aloha, OR (pronounced uh-LO-uh)
• Boring, OR
• Champoeg, OR (pronounced sham-POO-ee)
• Chehalis, WA (pronounced sha-HEY-liss)
• Chilliwack, BC
• Cle Elum, WA
• Coos Bay, OR (pronounced so that coos rhymes with goose)
• Coquitlam (and Port Coquitlam), BC
• Ekalaka, MT (pronounced ee-kuh-LAH-kuh)
• Estacada, OR (pronounced es-tuh-KAY-duh, like the name Kay)
• Esquimalt, BC (pronounced ess-KWAI-malt)
• Issaquah, WA (pronounced IZZ-ah-kwah)
• Klickitat (and Klickitat County), WA
• La Center, WA
• Moscow, ID (pronounced MOSS-koo)
• Nisqually, WA (not to be confused with Old Nisqually, WA)
• Onalaska, WA
• Osoyoos, BC (pronounced oh-SOY-yooz)
• Owhyee, ID (pronounced oh-WHY-yee)
• Pe Ell, WA (pronounced like the letters P and L)
• Puyallup, WA (a true shibboleth: pronounced pyoo-AL-up)
• Sequim, WA (pronounced skwim)
• Skamokawa, WA (pronounced ska-MOCK-a-way)
• Snohomish and Snohomish County, WA (pronounced snow-HO-mish)
• Snoqualmie, WA (pronounced snow-KWAL-mee)
• Sprague, WA (pronounced spreyg, in one syllable)
• Steillacoom, WA (pronounced STILL-a-koom)
• Squamish, BC
• Wahkiakum County, WA
• Walla Walla, WA
• Whatcom County, WA
• Willamette and the Willamette River, OR (another classic shibboleth: pronounced to rhyme with dammit)
• Yreka, CA (pronounced why-REE-kuh)

However, the one Cree village in Québec definitely deserves to be on this list too: Whapmagoostui, PQ. Also, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is pretty good.

From today’s Mercer Report on CBC (season 5 episode 17), Rick’s Rant perfectly sums up many of my feelings about the recent scandal involving the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party. (The transcription is mine, as is the addition of hyperlinks.)

Well, what a great week in Ottawa, hey, if by ‘great’ I mean ‘filled with scandal’. There was a new one every day, most of them involving the Prime Minister. Jack Layton was on Lou Dobbs, for god’s sakes; you don’t see that every day. But if I had to pick my favourite scandal it would have to be the Cadman affair. Did the Conservative Party offer Chuck Cadman, a Member of Parliament who was dying, a million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for his vote? Because that’s what his widow says. But you don’t have to take her word for it. Stephen Harper is on a tape saying yes, ‘financial considerations’ were offered to a dying man. Well, if you buy the adage that where there’s smoke there’s fire, there’s so much smoke coming out of this sucker you can see it on Google Maps.

And so what’s the Prime Minister say now? Forget my voice on the tape, the only thing we offered Chuck Cadman was a chance to join the Conservative Party. Stephen, no offence, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. Can you imagine, if you were on your deathbed, a couple of Tories came over to your house to try to buy you off and they offered you a membership in the Conservative Party? Because apparently a lot of people on their deathbed think, ‘Hmm, I wish I’d spent more time with the Tories.’

And so what’s Harper’s reaction once the opposition started asking questions? He’s suing. He’s suing the leader of the opposition. Never before in the history of Canadian democracy has a prime minister sued the leader of the opposition, but that’s what Harper’s doing. Suddenly, he’s like that guy on TV from upstate New York who’ll sue anyone anytime for anything. This coffee’s too hot? He will sue. Ask him a question outside of Question Period? He will sue. A lawsuit, by the way, that’s going to cost the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. Our money being spent to ensure the Prime Minister won’t answer any questions that should be answered. Yes, it’s been a crazy week. And it could also be a tipping point, because Stephen Harper has always had one ace in the hole: his reputation as a straight shooter. Well, you can wave that goodbye, because when it comes to preserving reputations, Conrad Black had a better week.

Google Calculator is pretty nifty, and able to handle some rather complex high-level (i.e. English-like) syntax. For example, it handles 1.190 CAD per litre in USD per gallon quite nicely, to let you figure out just how much that tank of gas you bought this afternoon cost (the answer, if you can’t be arsed to click on the link, is about USD$4.55—that’s what you get for having high oil prices combined with the recent woes of Alberta oil companies), compared with what they’re paying in the States (more than a dollar less, on average, per gallon). And Google Calculator is pretty awesome for this sort of thing.

But try stringing together several conversions, and even though it gets the parentheses right, it still utterly fails. The calculation 1.19 CAD per litre per 16 litres should parse as 1.19 $/L x 16 L, which reduces to $(1.19 x 16), but the calculator fails utterly on the calculation. Just look at the ridiculous answer: 75,111.0894 USD/metres to the sixth power! U.S. dollars weren’t even mentioned, and metres to the sixth power?? Now I truly understand what they mean by ‘a higher plane of existence’.

When I was a first-year undergraduate, one of my friends, also a first-year who had Ideas And Opinions, tried to reform the student body elections system to conduct the voting according to the Single Transferable Vote system. I believe it succeeded, and it was still being used at the institution in question, largely because inertia is such a powerful force and nobody really wanted to deal with this guy on a personal level. There are two major problems with STV: one, it’s horribly complicated, compared with your standard first-past-the-post system, and two, it’s sort of hard to tell what happens to your vote without intimidating mathematics and figures. This is largely why the BC-STV system, proposed by the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, failed when put up to a referendum in 2005. This editorial in today’s Vancouver Sun advocates for the adoption of the BC-STV system, as well as support for funding an educational campaign to counter the general ignorance that alternative systems of voting even exist in the first place.

So anyway, on Monday, there was an election in Alberta, and nobody noticed. The Conservative Party won their eleventh straight majority, picking up 73 of 83 seats in the provincial legislature. However, there was only a 43% turnout of registered voters, and of those votes only 52% went to the Tories. However, because of the way the votes were distributed and because of the low turnout, this translated into an 88% yield on seats. This was made possible because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, in which whichever candidate gets a plurality of all votes cast wins the election. The Sun editorial theorizes that had an STV system been in place instead, the results would have been something like 44 Conservatives, 22 Liberals, 7 from the NDP, 6 from the right-wing Wildrose Alliance Party, and 4 Greens. A far cry from 73 out of 83 seats going to the Tories, as it has been for the last several decades. Sure, they would have still had a majority, but it would not have been of the unreasonable 88% completely dominant majority type that we’re going to see again in Alberta.

When you have multiple significant parties several of which share similar platforms, such as, say, the Liberals and the NDP, or the Conservatives and the Wildrose Alliance, or (in the States) the Democrats and the Greens, you might want a way to be able to vote your conscience as well as vote pragmatically. STV allows you to do that by letting you vote your number-one preference for, say, the NDP, and your number-two preference for the Liberals. Or in whatever order you prefer. The standard first-past-the-post system pigeonholes you into exactly one of a few categories of opinion, and in doing so, penalizes small parties or small candidates. The effects of this can be far-reaching: for example, if you don’t have any safe way to vote for Ralph Nader, your vote for him is an unsafe one, because it might have gone to your second-choice candidate Al Gore, but without that vote to count towards his total, George Bush will win your state’s votes in the Electoral College. With STV, this scenario can be avoided because if you marked Ralph Nader as your first choice but Ralph Nader did not accumulate the necessary number of votes to pass a round of electoral counting, your second choice vote will go to Al Gore and tally up in his column.

At any rate, B.C. should adopt the BC-STV system in 2009 when it comes up for another vote, and this sort of lopsided elections mathematics can be avoided. All it takes is a little effort to understand, and a willingness to commit to the rights of all people to choose the parties and the people that will represent them.

Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, is beginning a libel action against the Liberal leadership, including Stéphane Dion, the party leader, as well as several other high-ranking party officials. He wants ‘defamatory’ articles to be removed from the Liberals’ web site, and that Dion read an apology, drafted by the Conservatives, before the entire House of Commons in both French and English, thus ensuring that embarrassment will stick to the Liberals in both French and English Canada. What, you may rightly ask, the hell is this all about?

From 1997 to 2005, the riding of Surrey North, in Metro Vancouver, was represented in the House of Commons by the independent MP Chuck Cadman. Independent MPs are somewhat uncommon in Canada, given the dominance that the three (in Québec four) major parties have over the system, but they can wield considerable power given that several major parties means frequent minority governments. Cadman was a former Conservative Party member, who lost the party primary, ran as an independent anyway, and won (think Joe Lieberman). In 2005, Cadman voted with the Liberals and New Democratic Party in favour of a budget proposal; the vote was eventually tied which meant the Speaker of the House of Commons had to cast the deciding vote. He voted with the Liberal bloc, which allowed the government to survive confidence. At the time, Cadman was terminally ill with cancer, and he died later in 2005.

Cadman stated that he voted with the Liberals because he didn’t want to put his constituents through more election turmoil only a year after a tumultuous election in 2004 that handed the Liberals minority control of Parliament. However, his wife Donna stated (before the vote), and his daughter Jodi has since reiterated that the Conservative Party offered Cadman a life insurance policy to the tune of a million dollars if he would vote against the Liberal budget and thus bring down the government. What is more, an audio tape has surfaced in which Stephen Harper, who was at the time the Leader of the Opposition, and is now PM, appears to give the plan his approval, in an interview with a CTV reporter in the driveway of Chuck Cadman’s house.

This appears to be attempted bribery, and as such a criminal offence, under Canadian law. But now Harper is moving to sue the Liberals for libel over their allegations that he personally was involved in this scandal. If you go to the Liberal Party website today—surely this will be gone in a few days’ time—you can see the ‘libellous accusations’ for yourself. The big headline: ‘Harper Knew of Conservative Bribery’. The problem for the Tories, of course, is that audio tape doesn’t lie, so they’re trying to turn the argument around and reframe the discussion: the Liberals are trying to slander my good name and the good name of the Conservative Party, oh poor me, you can’t possibly believe the Liberals because they’re lying cheats only trying to parlay this into their political advantage, and by the way Stéphane Dion should apologise both in English and French so that in Québec they hear a French-from-France accent (the equivalent to North American English speakers is a British accent) reading obsequious submission copy to the Conservatives. What’s weird, though, is that most of what’s on the web site consists of quotes from Question Period in the House of Commons, which are protected by parliamentary privilege and therefore not prosecutable as libel. The CBC is supposing that Harper wants to sue over the headlines, which are not so protected. Yay for legal hair-splitting.

I have a feeling that this could be more dangerous to the Conservatives than any of the other current issues, such as the military mission in Afghanistan and the federal budget and the environment. The issue, as Nik Nanos rightly points out, is that the Conservatives like to portray themselves as more trustworthy than the Liberals, but even the allegations of high-level bribery, even if nothing comes of them, could do great harm to the Tories’ image of trust, and harm the Conservatives when they have opportunities to pick up votes in minor byelections like in Vancouver Quadra, or in today’s snoozer provincial election in Alberta (which the Tories will win anyway, no doubt, but they seem to be suffering in turnout rates), or also in an impending federal election, if such comes to fruition.

Anyway, Question Period in Parliament is coming up in a few minutes, so I’ll put this topic to bed for now and watch the Liberals get outraged, as one MP told CBC just a few minutes ago: ‘How dare the Conservatives sue the opposition for doing their duty as the opposition’ (or words to that effect). It’s sure to be a goodie—CPAC will have it live, streaming, and in easy-to-swallow podcast format, as usual.

Once again I seem to have found myself in Vancouver International Airport (49 11 44 N 123 11 00 W), waiting to board the first of a series of flights that will take me from Vancouver to Rome. I am not taking my laptop on this trip, so I have been forced to pay for this hour of Internet time at one of these godawful kiosks scattered throughout the terminal. This kiosk consists of a computer with a display smaller than my laptop’s 13-inch screen, a bolted-down keyboard with a broken space bar, a trackpad located to the right (naturally) of the keyboard (judging by the distance between the keyboard and the trackpad, I would judge it probable that the designer of this kiosk had a right arm as long as the Trans-Canada Highway), no obvious way to make clicking motions or gestures with said trackpad, and a bare metal stool that makes the fabric-covered slabs of steel that Air Canada euphemistically calls ‘economy-class seats’ look downright luxurious by comparison. A few metres from me there is a gaggle of pre-teen girls with matching T-shirts loudly ordering coffee in heavily accented English from Starbucks while giggling and yapping even more loudly to one another in French, obviously thinking that nobody nearby can understand them. There’s still an hour before my flight boards, and I’ve run out of ‘useful’ things to do on the Internet that I’m now reduced to bored blogging. Sad.

At any rate, I’ll be more or less out of contact, unless by some miracle I manage to get some Internet access over the next week. I’ll be returning next weekend, hopefully with lots of good photos of Rome to spam all over this little corner of the Internet. So for now, ciao, and take care!

B.C. Ferries, the semi-private corporation providing ferry service throughout British Columbia, has changed its mind and decided to display a portrait of the Queen on all ships in the fleet after all. The company had been surreptitiously removing the monarch’s likeness from ships while they were in refit; nobody had really noticed until the Monarchist League of Canada raised a big stink:

The argument was that displaying the portraits was no longer appropriate once B.C. Ferries was divorced from government in 2003, but that explanation failed to mollify traditionalists (as well as those who point out that taxpayer-owned B.C. Ferries is about as private as Britney Spears’ personal life). The Monarchist League of Canada detected republicanism by stealth. The corporation’s phones rang off the hook.

“We have had strong public response today,” said company spokeswoman Deborah Marshall late Tuesday. So, in a display of flexibility rarely seen in such a monolithic enterprise, an executive decision was made to not only restore the portraits to the refurbished vessels, but to place them on new ferries, too.

Excellent. Good for them. The country’s involved in a war in Afghanistan that’s threatening to bring down the government, the national budget is in crisis and is also threatening to bring down the government, and people are worried about twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is to be used as evidence for the continued existence of the monarchy in Canada.

恭喜發財 — Gong Hey Fat Choi — Gōng Xĭ Fā Cái — Happy New Year!

I went over to Chinatown to see the lunar New Year celebration and parade for the Year of the Rat. There must have been a hundred thousand people there: along parts of the route, spectators were packed in like sardines three or four deep with two-way traffic trying to pass behind them between the crush of humanity and the storefronts. Also, it was chilly and raining (as usual). But those who braved it were rewarded with a spectacular event: dancers, marching bands, more dragons and lions than you could shake a stick at, and of course zillions of flags, banners, and streamers. Various politicians (and their staffs) were handing out the traditional red envelopes filled with chocolates: I collected some from the Honourable Gordon Campbell, premier of B.C. (whom I met briefly), His Worship Sam Sullivan, mayor of Vancouver, the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada (who, I believe, wasn’t actually there, but his lackeys were), and Gregor Robertson, MLA for Vancouver-Fairview. Not a bad haul, as these things go, I guess.

See the gallery of photos from the celebration.

For the past day or two I’d been working on an essay about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his recent remarks that seemed to imply ‘that some aspects of Muslim Sharia law could become part of British law.’ Of course, as is so often the case, Dr. Williams said nothing of the sort, but made it very easy for various parties—notably the media, who love a good controversial headline—to misinterpret what he had said. The full text of what he actually said, if you can parse the highly technical and academic language, is up at the Archbishop’s website. I was going to go through the relevant bits and try to pick them part, but now that I’ve read today’s Language Log, I’ve discovered suddenly that everything I could think of had been written by Geoff Pullum, with at least twice as much erudition and snark as I could manage on a good day.

Pullum’s key opinion is that Dr. Williams is an unsuitable leader for the Anglican church because he cannot ‘do the demanding job of holding this figurehead position without causing his church to fall apart in social and political discord.’ He further points out that Dr. Williams also took a number of positions on homosexuality that caused dissension in various sizable wings of the church. ‘The people who say he lacks the leadership skills for his job are basically right,’ says Pullum:

Dr Williams is a gentle, learned, brilliant, scholarly man, and a bit of a public relations doofus. I hate to say it, but the calls for his resignation are not unjustified. He should be the holder of an endowed Professorship of Theology and Law at some top-ranking university. He should not be a prominent church administrator, and certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury. Someone duller, more political, less original, and less intelligent must be found for that job.

Absolutely true, but I have a few caveats to add: First, would there really be no controversy if Dr. Williams were a professor somewhere, and not the Primate of all England? Just think of Ward Churchill and the media furor that surfaces whenever he opens his mouth. Furthermore, is it the case that religious leaders should not voice their political opinions? In other words, is it appropriate for a religious leader to use his religious pulpit as a political bully pulpit? (I have a very strong personal bias against this, but from a conceptual point of view I’m not sure what the answer is.)

But finally, this doesn’t address the underlying issue: to what extent should the secular state accommodate religious law? Back in 2004 there was a controversy in Ontario in which it was proposed to include shari’ah law in the Arbitration Act, which would make decisions rendered by shari’ah courts regarding private disputes legally binding. This had some Muslims, notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, worried that this would create a ’slippery slope’ and end up hurting Muslims more than it helped them. What do you do, for example, to prevent people—notably women—from being ‘coerced’ into using a system in which they might run the risk of unfair treatment? And what do you do when your religious law comes into conflict with established civil law? (And it is important to note that this is not just a Muslim concern; Jews, especially of the more Orthodox varieties, have many of the same problems with their own shadow court system, especially with the agunah problem).

Of course, there are no easy answers here: after all, this is one of the central post-Enlightenment questions in the Western world. But hopefully the current case of Dr. Williams can provide another data point and perspective in the current conversation, if we can get past the stupidity and sensationalism brought about by the media.

Over the last weekend, the rules for crossing the Canadian-American border changed: Canadians must now present a passport at the border to enter the United States. Previously, they’d let you across with nary a second thought, sometimes not even demanding to see your driver’s licence or any other form of identification: if you were driving a car with Canadian plates and appeared non-threatening, they would simply let you pass. This happened to me several times; usually they just asked me (on the American side) where I was coming from, where I was going, and waved me on through. I am given to understand that when you work in a profession like one with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Canadian Border Services Agency, or even security in general, you develop, over time, something of an eye for what might be trouble, and what will probably be fine. Now, of course, much of this is—consciously or otherwise—probably based on some underlying profiling (you’re white and drive a car in reasonably good shape? excellent, you’re neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler), but that’s life, I’m told, in this kind of a world.

The one exception to this rule, in my experience, has been the crossing at Point Roberts, a small exclave of Washington State that was created when the border was determined to lie at 49° north latitude, but before they had done the mapping to see what was out there (besides Vancouver Island, which was accounted for separately in the treaty). There are only two (major) reasons Canadians go to the Point: (1) cheap(er) gasoline and (2) visiting the U.S. post office or some other shipping outlet for sending or receiving purposes. Therefore, when you enter and leave the Point, they usually know what you’re on about, and therefore the litany of questions is very specific—if it even gets asked at all.

But now, an American law passed in the wake of 9/11 is mandating that everyone provide proof of citizenship (i.e. a passport) when entering the United States by sea and, more importantly, land. As of last January—over a year ago—the rules changed to mandate passports from all passengers entering the United States by air, which people appear to have dutifully followed, taking it as one of the many necessary of unnecessary changes that have taken place since 9/11, and for better or worse, going along with it. And carrying a passport for flights between the U.S. and Canada is a good idea anyway; it simplifies matters when you go through customs and immigration control—remember, they really are two separate countries.

I’ve been using the word passport relatively interchangeably with the phrase proof of citizenship; I should clarify that what is actually required is proof of identity and citizenship. A passport proves both those things, but so do some other things, which are listed in the NPR story linked to at the beginning of this post. A NEXUS card, for example, will serve these functions just as well as a passport, though I once tried to use my NEXUS card as identification in San Francisco Airport, which though totally legal, didn’t quite work because the agents I was talking to had no idea what it was. The other relatively new—and potentially quite scary thing that you will soon be able to use is an enhanced driver’s licence, which are now being rolled out in both British Columbia and Washington State. I will skip lightly over these except to note that people of the privacy-advocating sort are worried that these licences are the first step toward a national ID card in both Canada and the United States. But this is a discussion for another time.

What is amazing, though is that what with all the new regulations on the books, the U.S. border guards are not enforcing these policies. Let me repeat that: these new laws say you have to present a passport at the border, but those guys who work for the Department of Homeland Security will not turn you away if you don’t have a passport. They’ve pushed back the date on enforcement of law by at least eighteen months, meaning that it will come into effect in July 2009 at the earliest; until then you can expect to receive ‘an educational flyer’ when you cross the border sans passport. There appears to be some question, furthermore, as to the next step—that is, whether or not to press on with the regulations at all. Leading the opposition are three U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Ted ‘Series Of Tubes‘ Stevens (R-Alaska). These politicians all come from border states, surprise, surprise—guess whose economies are going to lose money if cross-border traffic is hindered further than it already is.

But one of the most salient objections I can think of—and one that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really surfaced yet—is that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration, for years and years, how insecure and unsafe America’s borders really are, and how desperately needed are new measures to strengthen border security. Well, the new measures just came into place, and guess what? Bush’s own government isn’t enforcing them! What blinding hypocrisy and idiocy!

Excellent news today for gay rights in the States! First, an appellate judge in New York has ruled that the state must recognise marriages performed in Canada between two people of the same sex. Excellent news for both Canadians in America and American gays who came up here to get married when Canada legalized gay marriage earlier this decade. Of course, the judgment recognises that a law might eventually be passed that would deny recognition to those marriages, but until such a law is on the books the marriages must be legally recognised in New York. This is a terrific victory, because it marks the first time any entity at the Federal level in the United States has afforded recognition in this kind of situation.

Second, and more legally interesting, a judge in Oregon has thrown out a lawsuit challenging a law passed by the legislature last year allowing the official recognition of domestic partnerships, allowing the law to come into effect immediately. The point being argued in court was whether or not one has a constitutional right, if one signs a petition, to have that signature officially tabulated. There had been a petition circulating in Oregon to put a referendum before the voters to ban any other form of union between two people of the same sex (read: gay marriage), but it barely did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot. The judge concluded that it is not a constitutional right to have one’s signature counted on a petition, which sounds like a counterintuitive position, but it is very soundly argued in the (surprisingly readable and understandable) ruling (PDF). Here’s the interesting bit from the ruling (pages 15–16):

I believe the State, through a variety of sources, has demonstrated to the average signer of a petition that it’s not making any promise that your signature ultimately will be counted. Some of those we’ve talked about. Some have to do with the fact that when you sign a petition, there are any number of ways in which your petition may never see again the light of day.

Now, admittedly, some of the most common of those have nothing to do with anybody acting on behalf of the State. The chief petitioner can simply give up and go home or raise some question in his or her own mind about a particular sheet and throw that sheet away just to save themselves the trouble of a challenge later. There are any number of ways when you sign a petition that you have no reasonable expectation that the State is promising it will make it all the way to home plate. …

If you’ll forgive kind of a folksy example, if one of my kids claims I promised them a Lamborghini when they graduated from high school, the fact that I cannot do so is some evidence that I never promised I would. And if the State is being said to have promised something that would be extraordinarily dif