Harper’s new Senators are paying him no heed,
Reform the Senate? They cannot see any need!
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Confusing Canadian socialism.
Did you hear? The New Democratic Party has been a main-stream political party in Canada for less than two months and the party is already denying that it is socialist. The party is obviously taking a page from Paul Martin’s Liberal book: Run on the left but rule on the right. At the NDP’s upcoming convention, it intends to remove the word socialist from the party constitution.
What some of us cannot figure out is what is wrong with being socialist? The NDP must have been listening to Stephen Harper. He is the Canadian expert on the Big Lie. Harper says socialism is bad and here we have the NDP agreeing with him.
Harper deliberately confuses socialism with communism as a bogeyman to scare the ignorant. Socialism came about historically to combat people such as Harper who believe in laissez faire economics. In the industrial revolution, the workers were brutalized by the laissez faire doctrine and socialism was conceived as a fair solution to all concerned. While Marx and Engels took this fairness to extremes in their Communist Manifesto, the world now knows that extremes will fail.
The shame of the NDP was that the well-balanced, progressive socialism of Tommy Douglas’ CCF was co-opted by the Canadian Labour Congress when the NDP was created. It gave power over the NDP to rabid unions created by the North American Depression of the 1930s. These were unions built on class struggle and they gave no nod to fairness in their negotiations.
But those unions also built the NDP into the party it is today. They provided the muscle and the organizational manpower that the NDP needed to survive during the years of third and fourth party status. It was these unions that had the hunger for reform.
What these unions did not acknowledge was that they were not alone. There was a strong and growing group of social activists in the Liberal Party who bought into the need for social reform in Canada. They saw control of Canadian business and resources as a tool to build a stronger and more prosperous country for all Canadians. They never called themselves socialists but they were.
At their convention, these NDP thinkers(?) also want to state that there is no way the party will ever merge with the Liberals. That could prove that they are just as myopic as the Liberal leadership in the last federal election.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Babel’s Allandale Station lands are Stations of the Cross,
It is where the city’s planning staff show us who is boss.
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The Whigs are with us in Babel.
It can be confusing. There is supposed to be a Conservative Party, a Liberal Party, a New Democratic Party and the various also-rans in Ontario electoral districts. Not in Babel. Trying to understand Babel politics is difficult. It is like stumbling on a village called Brigadoon that has been lost in the mists of the Scottish highlands for the past 100 years. The people you find running Babel’s Liberal Party are Whigs.
The Whigs were a political party active in the Parliament of Westminster in London, England from the 1780s to the 1850s. The Whigs had evolved from a loosely connected group called the Country party and were supported originally by the aristocracy. The Whigs were opposed to absolute rule by the monarch and their main opposition were the Tories who had originally been known as the Court Party. It was from these beginnings, that the Liberal and Conservative parties of Great Britain evolved.
But evolution has halted in Babel. Time has stood still here in this town on the bay. The descendants of the original five squires are still in control. Little happens in Babel that misses this Family Compact’s scrutiny. They care less of any difference between Whigs and Tories or between Liberals and Conservatives. They use it as a sham for the hoi polloi to believe they have choices.
Babel’s Family Compact divides the Babel political scene into insiders and outsiders. The insiders are those who are feted, honoured, accepted and elected. The outsiders remain wanderers in the mists of time.
A left-wing Liberal or a Red Tory coming to Babel is quickly labelled an outsider. Only unreformed Whigs are welcome in the local Liberal Party organization. The Conservative organizations, when allowed to exist, welcome monarchists, right-to-life extremists and neo-cons. They are not broadminded, just desperate.
If Babel voters have difficulty understanding the difference between the Conservative and Liberal candidate in an election, Babel’s Family Compact has done its job. The families feel that if they send someone to Ottawa or Toronto to vote for the party in power and these elected people bring back money to pave our streets, they have done their job. They think of the Parliaments of Canada and Ontario as extensions of Babel city hall.
The Whigs of Babel only seem to cross pollinate with their Tory counterparts. They compete for bragging rights, not for principles.
An outsider recently got into the workings of the federal Liberals and created a schism in the organization that came to a head before the recent federal election. The organization had nominated a candidate, raised money and got a campaign group rolling. This was all done without the Family Compact’s approval. That left them with just the Tory candidate, as sad as he might be. As none of this had Family Compact approval, the Whigs deserted the Liberal Party organization. It left the real Liberals in Babel wondering what had happened.
What happened was that the provincial Liberal Party got all the Whigs and the real Liberals were working in the federal organization. That should have worked in favour of the federals but they were left with no time to rebuild before the election.
And with a provincial election due in October, there are growing concerns that whomever the Family Compact picks as a Liberal candidate, there is little time for healing.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
The Harper Tories had a convention love-in,
They’d like him to continue to be a shoo-in.
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Comment for today.
It would be good to write about the provincial race in Babel.
To-date, there isn’t one.
It’d be so great to write about the Liberal candidate in Babel.
To-date, there isn’t one.
A year ago our mayoralty candidate was canvassing in Babel.
And, with hard work, he won.
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Watch out, watch out, the NIMBY’s are out.
A NIMBY is an urban phenomenon. The word means ‘Not in my back yard’ and applies to those people who appear suddenly when a developer attempts to improve a neighbourhood by building something new or novel, or unusual. Whatever it is, they will object to it. This is so prevalent at times that if someone tries to get a building permit for a respectable doghouse in their own backyard, there is an immediate line formed of neighbours complaining about possible disruption, noise, smell or possible loss of sunshine on their homes.
At Babel City Council, the other evening, we got ourselves mistaken for a NIMBY. It was accidental. The real concern is that access and egress from where we live, which is by way of a very narrow street. It is not only narrow but the street ends at the creek in a cul-de-sac.
A developer is planning an even higher condominium tower on the other side of our narrow street. The proposed building, which looks very good, by the way, was an excellent excuse to remind City Council that we voters, who already enjoy the neighbourhood, would like to have assured access to our property for ourselves, our visitors and for emergency vehicles.
The problem is not the new development but is the tendency for tourists, when enjoying some of our lakefront events, to ignore posted restrictions when parking their vehicles. In fact, they park anywhere they damn well please. They scale fences. They fertilize our bushes. The adults and their litters, litter. We welcome them as visitors to Babel but we sometimes lack a warm feeling towards them when they are disrespectful of our laws and our sense of decency.
The presentation we made to council was light on comment about the proposed development and heavy on discussion of the parking problem. We concluded our brief dissertation with an admonishment to council to take better care of our street for us.
But you still get branded a NIMBY. It cannot be helped
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Oh how we yearn to be young again an’ carefree,
When sex in the morning was better than coffee.
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Building blogging boundaries.
There are two things that a blogger needs. Bloggers need ideas and audiences. As a blogger, you always strive for that million-dollar idea that will send your readership soaring. A recent example of this was putting the idea of hookers in hard hats in a title. It was not that novel an idea, but it increased our audience. The line on the graph went north. Our readership has yet to move into the thousands but we have been pleased with the loyalty of hundreds of readers every month.
While we always put something fresh in the blog every day, we explain to readers that dropping by this site two or three times per month is more than enough to provide you would with fresh insights and something interesting to read. We can hardly be all things, to all people, all the time.
Nobody has given us an answer to our ongoing question as to whether we should run the occasional picture. Would it give the site a little more class? It might be fear that we will run our own picture. We can assure you, there is no danger of that.
To our chagrin, a reader has yet to suggest a topic for us. That is the writer’s struggle.
Mind you there is the occasional suggestion by a non-reader. We have some of those, believe it or not. One non-reader, whom we consider a friend, told us that he had absolutely no time to waste on reading useless things like blogs. And yet the same person, handed a printed copy of some 30,000 words we had written, called the other day to say he had read the piece and considered it most interesting. Go figure?
By the way, we have copies of The Babel Manifesto from the printer and a review copy is yours by mail if you promise to give the manifesto some thought and share those thoughts with us. How we are going to put the manifesto into broader circulation, has yet to be determined. We will, of course, promote it at times this summer when the news media are gushing about the silly royals being in Canada. The monarchy is just one of the many reasons why we must have an elected constitutional conference.
We know very well that there are people who yawn at the suggestion. W.A.C. Bennett, when he was Premier of British Columbia, was said to have made the comment that of the most important 100 things he could think of that needed doing in Canada, rewriting the constitution was item number 101.
One of the reasons, we are so polite about this is that there is a bit of a family tradition of tilting at windmills. Brother Edward and our father are and were ardent crusaders. Our late father was an expert on—of all things—trajectories. As an expert marksman, he knew how a bullet travelled in flight and the twists and turns that it might take. He applied this knowledge to the curved ball of baseball fame and felt that he was hard done by in trying to explain by the owners of organized baseball. What really annoyed him, we all knew, was that they did not care.
If the sports writers and broadcasters wanted to call a dropping fast ball, a ‘curved ball,’ that was their problem. Father knew damn well that the ball did not curve. That was an impossible feat.
Brother Edward tilts at more modern windmills. We should first explain that brother Edward is the smartest person we know. He is certified as a genius. He is a guy who had a career creating software languages. He does not write code. He writes the language for the code. Despite decades that both of us spent working with computers, he often talks of computer intricacies in terms that we have a hard time understanding.
Brother Edward knows that computer software that is produced today is just not up to snuff. He knows that it is based on concepts developed more than 30 years ago and is easily corrupted. He is most concerned that we let this corrupted software fly airplanes, control automobiles, produce cheques, run governments and do all sorts of things that might stop working because the software just collapses of its inadequacies. He worries about that and feels we should also worry about it.
Who can compete with that?
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]