A Kinder Tone - Week 45 - Mar 5-12

This could almost be Stephen Harpers "Mission Accomplished" moment, with a change in uniform.

 I'm going to start in a different way this week.  I was reading a story yesterday about business groups being upset about a 2.5% tax increase in Vancouver and how they responded with a childish newspaper ad.  The story itself doesn't matter, but as I read through the comments on the story I started to see some things.  Everybody that read the story already had their minds made up.  People were resorting to name calling and the conversation really degenerated.  I realized two things:

1) As soon as you start calling people names, any chance of a productive conversation is lost.
2) I've been doing some of that myself.

So, moving forward, I am going to try to eliminate personal attacks from this blog.  Don't get me wrong, I'm going to continue to ridicule ideas and suggest that people are ignorant, ill-informed or wrong.  But I'm not going to call them names and go for the cheap cheap score.

For example.  Rob Anders.  While last week there was a possibility that I could have resorted to calling him "Sleepy Time" Rob.  This week, I'm not going to do that.  I'm going to suggest that he's an incompetent buffoon for calling a group of veterans a "bunch of hacks" after they asked him entirely appropriate questions and then only apologizing once he realized that people were really, really angry.  So.  Yes, not entirely civil, but not scraping the bottom of the barrel either.

Now, back to the robo-call scandal.  Mr. Stephen Harper has decided to demand that the Liberals release all records related to their use of robo-calls, but feels it's entirely unnecessary to release their own logs as they are "obviously...not behind the calls".  Which is a really impressive re-purposing of logic.

A different type of fraud has raised its head, as apparently several thousand people signed up to vote at the last minute in a specific riding, many of them without addresses or with fake ones.  But not to worry, the Conservatives tell us everything was "fair".  Honestly though, what is Elections Canada doing to allow this?

In more election fraud news, some team members of a Conservative Minister are asking Elections Canada to take a look at the finances or their own campaign as they seem a bit fishy.

Copyright reform discussion is drawing to a close.  As Michael Geist points out, the industry is really trying to screw with things.  It's tough to feel like there is any kind of process, fair or otherwise, in how this bill is being handled.


Maher Arar points out that we haven't really learned anything about our experience with torture.  It seems like we've actually made it our official policy to encourage other nations to torture.

More back to work legislation.  This time for Air Canada.  Again.

Some information on the F-35 and how the US Military is cheating their own testing process.