It's been an interesting week. Of course, everything has been over-shadowed by the most Canadian of terrorist attacks. A French Canadian turned West Coaster turned Muslim attacked a War Memorial and Parliament with a rifle before being stopped by a retired gentleman. I don't want to diminish the seriousness of this. It is indeed a terrible event. A soldier is dead (a soldier in place to prevent teenagers from spray painting a war memorial) and, well, two soldiers are dead, but one of them has already been largely forgotten.
But there's been a lot of "this changes everything!" going on. I will admit that this does suggest we need better security at Parliament Hill. Guards with guns, perhaps. But if one crazed lunatic with a gun and one crazed lunatic with a car "changes everything" ...man, we're in trouble.
The response has been muted a bit more than I expected. There's the right mix of discussion about "increased security" and "not caving in to terror". But some of the first words out of Stephen Harper's mouth were about giving law enforcement more tools to do their job. What does that mean, exactly? Do we really need more surveillance? Worse? The hit and run terrorist was already being watched. And the Parliament Hill terrorist had been denied a passport and was on somebodies radar. Is "more tools" the answer to not doing a very good with the tools that we currently have? "Making it illegal to condone terrorism online" certainly isn't a step we should be taking. What does that even mean?
As well, we have this. The PM got shoved in a closet and MP's were wielding flagpoles as spears. And are keeping the spears as trophies.
CBC actually has this as an "Exclusive!". The Parliament Hill shooter used a piece of junk mail as a license plate. Conservatives set to announce new legislation seeking enhanced penalties for using junk mail as a license plate.
The Cons have decided that now isn't the right time to unveil legislation to make it easier to buy a gun.
This was written before the attack on Parliament hill. Greenwald points out that we've been at war for 12 years and shouldn't be surprised that there are repercussions.
Of course, all of this is somewhat related to our "taking it to ISIS". This Tyee article points out that most of the wars and/or saber rattling that we've completed over the last 10 years has been a disaster (Libya. Afghanistan. Ukraine). Trudeau thinks it's Stephen Harper's ego that is the cause of our mission.
This is fairly damning. Canada is ranked last of OECD Nations - 58th overall! - in dealing with climate change. We beat Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia though!
A pretty fascinating interview with Pierre Polievre on partisanship. It would be similar to interviewing Gretzky about scoring goals. If Gretzky was a bit delusional and had insane ideas on how to score goals and painted himself as a non goal scorer.
I'm not super excited about the Christy Clark plan for LNG. Accepting a pittance from multinationals making billions off of our resource seems like a terrible plan.
Home mail delivery for 74,000 addresses stopped this week.
The Conservatives have a new batch of out-of-context quotes/attack ads.
Great news! Another Quebec only political party. That will sort things right out.
Somebody points out that we're putting more effort into silencing bird watchers than we are into catching tax cheats. This is a good point.
The Cons commissioned a "health report" on the effects of Marijuana. It's fairly one sided.
There's another nomination skirmish over an easy Conservative seat. In this one, the battle is against one guy selling Conservative party memberships out of his fathers Canadian Tire, and another guy who lives far, far away from the riding.
A story summarizing all of the companies that have recently pulled out of the Oil Sands.
There were warnings that our ability to deal with stranded ships on the North Coast is terrible.
Kinder Morgan doesn't really get it. Tries to prove First Nations don't actually eat all that much fish, so why should they be so concerned about an oil spill in the Fraser, right?
America! Fuck Yeah! The Koch Brothers have a new batch of dirty tricks. Now, they're running pro-pot ads to entice liberals/Democrats to vote for a Libertarian candidate so that their Republican candidate can win.
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