1 December 2008 @ 9:06AM >> Multiculturalism as practiced on college campuses isn’t about tolerance and inclusion, it’s about ranking people based on the groups they fit into and treating them accordingly.

Case in point:

Students at an Ottawa university are pulling out of a Canada-wide fundraiser that provides close to $1 million a year for cystic fibrosis research and treatment, arguing that the disease “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” - something experts say is untrue.

The Carleton University Students Association voted Monday night overwhelmingly in favour of choosing a new charity to support during its orientation week in September, in lieu of Shinerama, which raises money for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

The foundation funds research into cystic fibrosis, a fatal, genetic disease that affects both sexes with a similar frequency and is most common among Caucasians. The foundation also helps fund services for people with the disease. It affects mainly the lungs and digestive system, causing a build-up of thick mucus that leads to infection and inflammation.

The student council motion stated that orientation week “strives to be inclusive” and “all orientees and volunteers should feel like their fundraising efforts will serve their diverse communities.”

[...]

Brittany Smyth, president of the Carleton University’s student council, said she is trying to get in touch with the cystic fibrosis foundation because she doesn’t want the group to think Carleton students are switching charities for the wrong reason. She said the clause about cystic fibrosis being a white man’s disease was not the determining factor in Monday night’s vote, but for now the council is sticking to the decision and looking for a different cause to support next fall.

Apparently, the decision to drop the cystic fibrosis charity is being reconsidered, but so far, it stands.

Update: The Carleton University Student Association has reversed itself and reinstated the fundraiser.

14 July 2008 @ 8:50AM >> In Canada, there is no such thing as free speech. Say something someone doesn’t like, and you can end up in front of a “Human Rights Commission,” which has the power to punish you and even restrict what you might say in the future. These courts also have no rules of evidence, and the truth of what you’ve said is not a defense. The only thing that matters is whether someone from a group higher up in the Multicultural Hierarchy is willing to stand up and accuse you. Perhaps that explains why these commissions have a 100% conviction rate.

Ezra Levant is a journalist currently on trial in Canada. Recently, he spoke before a congressional caucus in Washington:

My expertise in the subject matter of today’s session was not acquired voluntarily, but by unhappy experience: I have been the subject of government persecution for my political and religious views for nearly 900 days. Unfortunately, stories like mine are not uncommon in the world. But they’re not supposed to happen in Canada, one of the freest countries.

In February of 2006, I was the publisher of a Canadian magazine called the Western Standard. We published a news story about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, and the riots in the Muslim world that followed. To illustrate what all the fuss was about, we accompanied the story with pictures of several of those cartoons. It was a news story in a news magazine.

Before our magazine even hit the streets, a radical imam named Syed Soharwardy asked the police to arrest me - for blaspheming against Islam. The police didn’t, of course. But the Alberta “human rights commission”, a government agency, accepted Soharwardy’s complaint, and then an identical one from the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities. The government has been investigating me ever since, including summoning me to a 90-minute interrogation. According to access to information documents, no fewer than 15 bureaucrats are working on my case. I’m a major crime scene!

Since then, Canada’s largest news magazine, called Maclean’s - our equivalent to Time magazine - was sued in three different human rights commissions for writing about the demographic growth of Islam in the West. And the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the largest newspaper in Atlantic Canada, is being pursued by Nova Scotia’s human rights commission for printing an editorial cartoon depicting a local Muslim activist in a niqab - even though that is how she dresses.

In other words, Canadian human rights commissions — secular government organizations — are prosecuting religious fatwas. It’s a soft jihad against any criticism of radical Islam. It’s called “lawfare”, and it’s a greater danger to our western values of freedom, religious pluralism and the separation of church and state than the hard jihad of terrorism is. Even if targets like Maclean’s eventually “win”, they lose; the process is the punishment - and the chill affects everyone else.

Canadian human rights commissions, however, are not respectful of the sensitivities of all religions. Less politically correct faiths are regularly prosecuted by them. This May, an Alberta pastor named Stephen Boissoin was given a lifetime gag order, never to say anything critical of homosexuality - not in a church sermon, not even in private e-mails. As well, in what can only be called a Maoist verdict, he has been ordered to renounce his religious beliefs, and to publish a self-denunciation in the local newspaper.

This is Canada we’re talking about. Not Iran, not China, not Cuba.

[...]

The actual wording of the laws is to ban anything that is quote, “likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt”. Note the word “likely” - you don’t actually have to do anything wrong. You can be convicted for a “pre-crime”, something that hasn’t happened yet. And look at what’s illegal: causing emotions. Not real harm or damages. Just exposing someone to feelings. By the way, the truth of what you say is not a defence. And at the Maclean’s magazine trial last month, half a day was spent determining whether their jokes were funny. They even had a joke expert.

Don’t laugh - literally. Just three weeks ago, a comedian was ordered to stand trial for telling off-colour jokes in a night club. Warning to Chris Rock: don’t bother coming to Canada.

If the government of Canada doesn’t allow freedom of thought or speech, then Canada effectively allows no freedom at all.

1 February 2008 @ 8:34AM >> In Canada, reviewing a fictional book can be considered evidence of a hate crime.

Mark Steyn, who is currently being brought up on hate speech charges by an extrajudicial government arm inappropriately called a “Human Rights Commission,” once reviewed a novel depicting a future in which America succumbs to Sharia law by the year 2040.

Steyn’s description of the book’s plot points is now being cited as evidence of “blatant Islamophobia,” to which he responds:

But the plaintiffs, and presumably the "human rights investigators" to whom they took their complaint, apparently believe that describing the plot of a novel should be actionable. I wonder how, say, Margaret Atwood feels about that. A few years back, she wrote her own dystopian theocratic fantasy about an America renamed the Republic of Gilead and under the thumb of a Falwell-Schlaflyesque Christian tyranny. What's to stop a Christian group taking a doting Atwood reviewer - or maybe the author herself - to a Canadian "human rights" kangaroo court? C'mon, you leftie novelists, what do you think there’ll be left for you to write about once the plot of a work of fiction becomes a recognized “hate crime”?

Of course, the “leftie novelists” probably aren’t worried. They’re in on the joke, and they know that hate speech laws will never be applied to them as long as their invective is directed at the right targets.

16 December 2007 @ 5:05PM >> One of my favorite writers is in trouble for speaking his mind—and speaking the truth—in Canada:

Celebrated author Mark Steyn has been summoned to appear before two Canadian judicial panels on charges linked to his book “America Alone.”

The book, a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, argues that Western nations are succumbing to an Islamist imperialist threat. The fact that charges based on it are proceeding apace proves his point.

Steyn, who won the 2006 Eric Breindel Journalism Award (co-sponsored by The Post and its parent, News Corp), writes for dozens of publications on several continents. After the Canadian general-interest magazine Maclean’s reprinted a chapter from the book, five Muslim law-school students, acting through the auspices of the Canadian Islamic Congress, demanded that the magazine be punished for spreading “hatred and contempt” for Muslims.

The plaintiffs allege that Maclean’s advocated, among other things, the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization. They insist such a notion is untrue and, in effect, want opinions like that banned from publication.

Two separate panels, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, have agreed to hear the case. These bodies are empowered to hear and rule on cases of purported “hate speech.”

Of course, a ban on opinions - even disagreeable ones - is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about.

It doesn’t matter whether Steyn and Maclean’s win the case. The mere fact that they are forced to go to court to defend their free speech rights is punishment enough, and it will encourage others in Canada to keep quiet.

Not everyone who runs afoul of the Speech Police will have the time, resources or resolve to fight for what is an obviously basic right in any truly free society. So this action will immediately silence an unknowable number of people whose opinions run the risk of offending Members of an Anointed Group.

Whatever the outcome, Canadians shouldn’t fear that they might lose their right to think freely. They should mourn, because that right is long gone.

13 December 2007 >> An “honor” killing among our neighbors to the north:

A 16-year-old girl died in hospital late Monday night, hours after police in Mississauga received a call from a man saying he had killed his daughter.

Muhammad Parvez, 57, has been charged with murder in connection with the death of his daughter, Aqsa Parvez. He will appear Tuesday in a Brampton court.

The victim’s 26-year-old brother, Waqas Parvez, has been charged with obstructing police.

Students at nearby Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga said the teen had recently clashed with her family after ceasing to wear a hijab and adopting a more Western style of dress.

According to police, the chain of events began yesterday morning with a phone call from a home near Hurontario Street and Eglinton Avenue.

“At 7:55 a.m., we received a 911 call from a man claiming that he had just killed his daughter,” Constable J.P. Valade of Peel Police said.

20 June 2007 @ 8:18AM >> As Hollywood gears up the hype machine to promote Michael Moore’s most recent political advertisement, it would be wise to remember that entrusting your health to government bureaucrats does have its risks. A look at Canada’s government-run system shows what happens to those who fall through the cracks: permanent, life-altering damage or even death.

Free Market Cure, a newly-launched website, provides some facts you might not see in Moore’s film. The site already contains four short videos covering healthcare issues, with more to come.

24 March 2007 @ 10:54AM >> In Canada, decisions about health care services are made by political appointees. So naturally, the provisioning of such services becomes politicized.

Few people know this more acutely than Janice Fraser. She needed a bladder operation but was told that, under Canada’s strictly regulated national health system, the hospital was only allowed to perform 12 such operations a year. At her position on the waiting list, she’d have to wait nearly three years. Janice wasn’t going to be able to wait that long; she was running the risk of wearing an external urine bag for the rest of her life.

So Janice hoped that she’d be able to make a personal appeal to Ontario’s Health Minister, a man named George Smitherman. Unfortunately for Janice, Smitherman didn’t have time to meet with her. He was too busy meeting with other constituents, including a man living as Susan Gapka. The time Gapka spent with the Health Minister helped convince him to support government coverage of sex change operations.

Two Women, a new short film by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg (the executive producers of Indoctrinate U) shows how putting health care decision-making in the hands of politicians yields decisions that are politically motivated. Instead of serving individuals like Janice, politicians would rather pick up votes in blocks by catering to interest groups.

For Janice Fraser, who did not belong to a politically correct interest group, the results were tragic.

6 December 2006 >> Filmmaking cohort Stuart Browning has posted a new short video over at the On The Fence Films. A Short Course in Brain Surgery looks at the plight of Canadians under their “single payer” health care system.

When things don’t work out so well under Canada’s government monopoly, you know what some Canadians do? They come here, to get treated in a matter of days for procedures that they wait months or years for just a few miles further north.

I have no doubt that the new Democratic majority will eventually try to bring Canada’s system here. Before they do, every American should see A Short Course in Brain Surgery and the earlier companion film, Dead Meat.

(Next on the plate for On The Fence Films: a trailer for Indoctrinate U. Finally!)

4 January 2006 @ 1:50PM >> The factual inaccuracies in the reporting of self-proclaimed economics expert Paul Krugman are so plentiful that an ad-hoc “truth squad” exists online solely to correct his many errors.

You can add Stuart Browning to the ever-expanding list of truth squad members. Stuart—one of the executive producers of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U—is also working on his own project analyzing the Canadian health care system. Last October, he and Blaine Greenberg—my two partners in On The Fence Films—released a short film called Dead Meat on the topic, and more will come later this year.

In his research on health care, Browning is discovering the various tricks that advocates of socialized medicine use to portray Canada as the utopian ideal of health services, an image that Krugman tries to promote when he describes the Canadian model as the “obvious solution” to the perceived shortcomings of our system.

Browning writes:

What Krugman doesn’t say is that its easy to hold down health care costs if you do what Canada does: withhold medical treatment from sick and injured people. The U.S health care system could save billions of dollars if we drastically reduced the number of doctors, hospitals, outpatient clinics, medical devices and diagnostic machines available. If we followed Canada’s lead, we would severely limit each surgeon’s allotted hours in the operating room so that they couldn’t perform too many surgeries. Americans would wait months and years for critical medical tests and treatments - many would suffer greatly, become crippled, addicted to painkillers, go blind or die while waiting - however, the country would spend a lot less money on health care.

Browning then proceeds to administer a fact-based smackdown of Krugman’s spin. It’s a good read if you’re not Paul Krugman. And if you are, you may want to avoid the embarrassment.

8 December 2005 @ 4:04PM >> They’re nearing the bottom of the slide in Canada. And plenty of people would like it to happen here, too.

It’s strange that you can find so many who will expend oxygen defending rights that don’t appear in the constitution, yet when the Second Amendment comes under attack, they just shrug their shoulders.

1 November 2005 @ 12:50PM >> While schoolchildren elsewhere were eating candy corn and cutting pumpkins out of construction paper, kids in Toronto public schools were “writ[ing] health warnings for all Halloween candies.” Why? Because Halloween is the latest target of political correctness.

Last week, teachers in Toronto received a memo from the District School Board advising them to “forego traditional classroom Halloween celebrations because they are disrespectful of Wiccans and may cause some children to feel excluded.”

Canada’s National Post reports:

“Many recently arrived students in our schools share absolutely none of the background cultural knowledge that is necessary to view ‘trick or treating,’ the commercialization of death, the Christian sexist demonization of pagan religious beliefs, as ‘fun,’ ” says the memo.

Entitled “Halloween at TDSB Schools: Scarrrrrry Stufff,” the document seeks to clarify for teachers and principals the extent to which Halloween activities should be pursued in multicultural settings. [...]

The memo goes on to remind teachers that, “Halloween is a religious day of significance for Wiccans and therefore should be treated respectfully.”

As is usual, the people who have decided to take offense to Halloween on behalf of Wiccans don’t necessarily have the support of the Wiccans:

Nicole Cooper, a first-degree priestess of the Wiccan Church of Canada’s Toronto Temple, agreed. “Frankly, Wiccans are a minority — an extreme religious minority,” she said.

The Halloween celebrations of North American pop culture, she added, are “not actually threatening to my religion anymore than eggs and cute little bunnies are threatening to Easter.”

[...]

“If I had children I wouldn’t deprive them of that — it’s a really fun thing to do. It’s engaging in the spirit of the season; it’s exciting for kids,” Ms. Cooper said.

That argument won’t get you very far, though. “Fun” is a concept completely foreign to the High Priests of Political Correctness, the mentally disfigured intellectual dwarves who dwell in the twilight of the mind concocting new ways to get upset on behalf of other people who often don’t want the “help” in the first place.

But it makes me wonder: what kind of culture will we be left with if we rid ourselves of everything that makes us unique just so we don’t offend any new arrivals? We bend over backwards to accommodate every foreign and fringe culture, but at the same time, we don’t even show half that respect to the culture that already exists here.

Are the High Priests of Political Correctness really concerned with being open to other cultures? Or is their real goal to destroy ours?

14 June 2005 @ 10:01AM >> Canada’s universal healthcare system guarantees that every citizen receives equal access to care. In order to enforce such equality, Canada made it illegal for a person to spend his own money on private care. Doctors who provide medical care outside of the Canadian state system are therefore breaking the law.

But that might be changing. Canada’s Supreme Court recently opened the door for Quebec’s citizens to pay for private care outside the socialized medicine system:

Canada’s Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Quebec law that banned private insurance for services covered under Medicare, a landmark decision that could affect the country’s universal health-care system.

The justices took a year to rule on a case that began in 1997, when George Zeliotis, an elderly Montreal man, tried to pay for hip replacement surgery rather than wait nearly a year for treatment at a public hospital.

[...]

Although the ruling was made on the Quebec law, it likely will affect other Canadian provinces that forbid residents from buying private health care insurance for treatment under the country’s Medicare system.

Opponents of changes to Medicare claimed it could force Canada into a two-tiered health care system in which those who have deeper pockets get faster, better service from doctors who opt out of the public health-care program.

The logic of the opponents here is that everyone should be forced to be equal by preventing people from buying better care elsewhere if they can afford it. They’d prefer someone to go without medical care as long as equality is maintained.

The Canadian system is a perfect example of socialism in action: everyone receives equally crappy care, and everyone has to spend an equally long time on the waiting list in order to receive that care.

The 1984 Canada Health Act affirmed the federal government’s commitment to provide mostly free health care to all, including the more than 200,000 immigrants arriving each year, under a system called Medicare.

But the universal health-care system [...] has been plagued by long waiting lists and a lack of doctors, nurses and new equipment. Some patients wait years for surgery, MRI machines are scarce and many Canadians travel to the United States for medical treatment.

In most Canadian provinces, it is illegal to seek faster treatment and jump to the head of the line by paying out of pocket for public care. Private health clinics have sprouted up even though they are technically illegal, though the provincial governments tend to look the other way.

This article, which appeared in London’s Guardian, also sports a little editorializing from the writer, who asserts that Canada’s system is “considered one of the fairest in the world.” Precisely who considers the Canadian system fair is not stated; the writer just assumes everyone agrees. I bet that the people who spend months and years waiting for procedures that they could have today if only they lived in the United States would not consider the system fair.