OMG. It's the Gay Pride weekend in Toronto and I should be looking forward to the festivities.
Canada Day and Gay Day what more could you ask for?
But instead I'm lying in my tree hammock in my jockey shorts, cruising for a cool breeze, quaffing gallons of lemonade.
And wondering do I REALLY have to go to the Pride parade?
Some days when I look at the horror of the Con regime, I find it hard to decide which of their ghastly actions disgusts me the most.
The absurd sight of Stephen Harper swaggering around the world telling political leaders that they should all follow his example. Because he's a model leader and Canada's back eh?
Even as he turns us into a backward petrostate, and sells us out and humiliates us like we've never been sold out or humiliated before.
Ever since I was a boy, trains have been my favourite way to travel.
I love gliding along, stretched out in a comfortable seat with plenty of leg room, reading a book, checking out the web, having a snack and a coffee.
Or just staring out of the big windows at the awesomeness of Canada. For there is no better way to see it.
And one of my fondest travel dreams is to be able to one day ride The Canadian all the way to Vancouver. If I can ever save up enough money to do that eh? And if Via Rail is still around.
I wanted to give Michaëlle Jean the benefit of the doubt, when she said two years ago that she saved Stephen Harper's Con regime during the Coalition Crisis, in the higher interests of the nation.
My preoccupation was really to make the best decision in the interest of the country. What was best for the country.
Q: In terms of what informed or guided you, was it the best interests of the country, full stop?
A: History will judge. But I think that everything that I anticipated happened. And this was part of my thoughts.
But I think that Peter Russell's views about what really happened are closer to the truth.
OMG. Mothers hide your children. It appears that Stephen Harper has set out to try to woo Quebec.
Stephen Harper and more than a dozen of his cabinet ministers chose Quebec to kick off the Tories’ political “summer of love,” wooing support with their economic plan and a pledge to work with the Parti Québécois if it is elected to govern the province.
And what an absurd spectacle it was. Great Ugly Pretty Lover Leader and half his Con cabinet gathered in Saint-Narcisse-de-Beaurivage (population 1,000) mumbling sweet nothings to the separatists. While his flunkies played the fiddle.
It's a Canadian horror story. A young boy is taken from his Toronto home by his Jihadi father, to a place he never should have been.
He is riddled with shrapnel, shot twice in the back. The bullets exploding out of his chest and exposing his beating heart.
He is taken to the ghastly gulag called Guantanamo, tortured by the Americans and betrayed by his own government. Even though he was a child soldier.
And now when he is so close to coming home at last, who does he find blocking his return? The monstrous Con Vic Toews.
I really liked the way that Google marked the 100th birthday of Alan Turing.
Not because I was able to crack the code eh? I gave up trying to figure it out after about five minutes, with smoke coming out of my ears.
Not for making me feel like a complete idiot. Thanks Google.
But for honouring the memory of this gentle gay genius.
In the last few days right-wingers in the media and the twittersphere have been going around claiming that the Quebec student movement is running out of steam.
And if you read this story you might think that was true.
Large daytime protests are being held in Quebec today, just as they have for each of the last four months, on the 22nd of each month.
Thousands of people are marching in Montreal and Quebec City.
But the crowds are noticeably smaller than in the past.
Until you saw this photo of the crowd in Montreal today...
Oh no. How embarrassing. Just a few days ago he made a spectacular entrance at the G20 Summit, declaring that the whole world should follow Canada's economic model.
Because he's a real economist eh?
But tonight he's riding the burro backwards, as all around him the model crumbles.
Remember when Vic Toews claimed that even though Bill C-10 will swell our overcrowded jails to the bursting point, the Cons wouldn't have to build any new prisons?
Toews opened his speech to the Economic Club of Canada in Ottawa by saying he wanted to dispel "egregious myths" and "blatant untruths" that are told to the public by his political opponents and that he wanted to set the record straight.
One of those myths, according to Toews, is that the government is going to be forced to build new prisons to house a higher inmate population because of new justice legislation. Toews said the predicted increase in prisoners hasn't materialized in the last two years and that in fact, the government is closing prisons.
And I suggested that the Con regime's sinister Minister of Prisons was just playing with his marbles or his words.
It's an inspiring sight, and a chilling one. Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer standing up for the right to know the truth, in a country where the Big Lie rules.
As the Cons try to smear him and muzzle him as they have so many others. They have attacked him for a long time. Jim Flaherty has called him "unbelievable" "unreliable" and "incredible."
But surely this is the limit.
They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones eh?
So it seems to me Jason Kenney really should know better than to call the Deputy Premier of Alberta an asshole.
The only explanation seems to be that when Jason Kenney, the federal immigration minister, hit the button on his personal email account, he accidentally hit “reply all.”
Why else would he declare to the world in an email that he thinks Alberta’s deputy premier, Thomas Lukaszuk, is a “complete and utter asshole”?
I knew that the NDP's support in Quebec would improve as soon a Tom Mulcair became leader.
Nobody hates the Con regime more than Quebecers do. And they know a fighter when they see one.
But this is still stunning.
I like the words on this mural at the East side gallery in Berlin. "If they don't let us dream, then we don't let them sleep."
Because the day we stop dreaming about a better world, is the day that we start dying eh?
And those who would betray the future don't deserve to sleep easy.
Because it is being betrayed. In Greece, where austerity is killing a country, and the young are the big losers.
Like so many things in Quebec these days it was an amazing sight.
Eighty thousand people in downtown Montreal watching an outdoor show by Loco Locass, a very popular and very political hip hop group.
The group was dressed in red and waving a Quebec flag with a red square sewn on it to show their support for the student movement.
But the truly magic moment came when they invited the movement's leaders on stage, and they all sang one of the group's biggest hits, Libérez-nous des Libéraux...Free us from the Liberals.
Sometimes when I stare at the horror of Harperland, like Simon in the Lord of the Flies stared at the head of the pig, I get a bit depressed eh?
I don't know how I'm going to make it to the next election. Three years seems such a long time.
And one really has to wonder whether there will even be an election the way things are going in Harper's Canada police state,
It was the Canadian Parliament's darkest day, and at the same time one of its finest.
Each new round of voting began with a round of applause from the New Democrat benches and ended with whoops and cheers from the Conservatives whose majority might means they’ve voted down every motion so far.
I tried to watch it on CPAC but I couldn't. It was too horrible. The sight of the Cons whooping it up like they were in a bar, or at a rodeo. The sight of Stephen Harper mocking the opposition by opening his mouth and showing his teeth...
Well there he was the other day, telling a big economic conference in Montreal that his government's economic policies were a model for the whole world.
But if you look at the expression on his face as he reads his prepared lines, you really have to wonder whether he still believes what he is saying.
Whether he is still trying to fool us into thinking he's an economist. Or whether he's simply delusional.
Is there any truth Stephen Harper's Con regime won't try to deny? Is there anyone they won't try to muzzle?
The federal public safety minister’s office tried to scale back an apology the RCMP delivered earlier this year to the families of serial killer Robert Pickton’s victims, Postmedia News has learned.
The revised statement did not include any acknowledgement that the RCMP “could have done more” in the Pickton investigation and the apology was limited to saying “how very sorry we are for the loss of your loved ones.”
And how deep is the depth of Vic Toews' moral depravity?
The Grand Prix of Montreal is finally over, and sadly my favourite driver Anarcho Panda, the gentle mascot of the student movement, didn't win.
And although there were a lot of red squares and red Ferrari shirts at the race.
If you wore a red square anywhere near the Grand Prix activities you risked being searched, detained, and politically profiled.
Oh boy. It was such a beautiful day. I went for a long bike ride, and this evening from a distance Toronto never looked so pretty.
At least the parts I could see through the thick haze.
Because there was a smog alert eh?
But then I remembered I live in a city run by Rob Ford and his brother Doug.
“You never know. You get the wild ones — you say one thing, and all of a sudden you get 4,000 letters. So anyways, we’re going over to your place for some Polish sausage, I guess, and we’re all good.”
It's Saturday night in Montreal, and the Grand Prix party is just warming up. Thousands of people are milling around on Ste Catherine street.
Demonstrators, racing fans, tourists, party kids, riot police.
And I'm watching the live feed on CUTV and can't believe what I'm seeing. So I can understand why some tourists think they're watching a movie.
Last night I told you how the Harper regime was creating a Royal Canadian Oil Police to make sure that nobody but NOBODY stops their planned pipeline to British Columbia.
Today they're setting up a Royal Canadian Mop and Pail Brigade to clean up this latest oil spill.
Up to 3,000 barrels of crude oil have spilled from a pipeline into a tributary of the Red Deer River in west-central Alberta.The area around Sundre is considered pristine wilderness by many in Alberta. It’s a common getaway area for people in Calgary and popular with anglers and hunters.
I've been writing about Stephen Harper for a long time, and every year the picture on the screen gets darker and more sinister.
Just as I always knew it would. For his lust for power knows no limit. And his ideological depravity knows no bottom.
But so dark is the picture now, that I am starting to wonder whether I am witnessing a silent coup.
Uh oh. I KNEW it was a mistake to make Dean Del Mastro, the Con point man on the robocall scandal.
One moment he was leading the charge, bellowing like a bull, claiming da Liberals did it, and that the Cons didn't do dirty stuff like that.
The next moment he was under investigation.
It seems like it took forever. But tonight bullied children in Ontario are finally a little bit safer.
And gay kids have the right to call themselves gay, and form Gay-Straight Alliances.
No matter what some Catholic School Boards have to say, or what grotesque homophobes like Charles McVety spew out of every orifice.
I'm not sure I agree with this kind of protest.
I'd prefer to see a million angry Canadians in the streets.
But anything is better than nothing.
To resist is a sacred duty.
And silence is not an option.
Oh no. Somebody please stop him. It looks as if Jean Charest has finally, as we say in Québec, perdu ses pédales, or lost his pedals.
He's so eager to discredit the students, so he can run against them in a snap election, he's accusing them of plotting to sabotage the Montreal Grand Prix. And now look what he's done.
As you probably know I'm not exactly a fan of Jason Kenney.
Ever since he said that gays should be free to marry, but only if they married someone of the opposite sex, I have had trouble taking him seriously eh?
And I don't think I could EVER trust a middle aged religious fanatic who is "saving himself" for marriage, but believes that WE are the ones who need saving from Satan...or the Liberals.
It was wet and miserable in Montreal today. But that didn't stop thousands of people from attending a rally to support the Quebec students.
Thousands of people clad in raincoats and carrying umbrellas gathered in Montreal's Jeanne-Mance park Saturday afternoon for what was billed as a family-friendly protest in support of Quebec's students and in opposition of Bill 78.
And not only were there more kids than usual, but there were also more older people.
In 1985 the late Quebec filmmaker Pierre Falardeau made a short movie called Le Temps des Bouffons (The Time of the Buffoons).
It showed members of the Montreal elite partying at the exclusive Beaver Club, dressed in colonial costumes.
And Falardeau used those scenes to make a biting, and deliciously vulgar comment, about the state of Quebec society.
I'm sad to see that so many GM workers are losing their jobs in Oshawa.
The Canadian Auto Workers union received official notice Friday that GM will begin shutting down its consolidated assembly line in the fourth quarter, which will wipe out 2,000 jobs, reducing the number of GM employees in Canada to about 8,000.
I feel sorry for their families, the latest victims of the Dutch Disease, and of the Con Master Plan to turn us into a low wage economy.
They don't call Jean Charest the Mad Emperor of Quebec for nothing eh?
For this is madness.
Four days of negotiations ended in an impasse on Thursday when Premier Jean Charest’s government refused to budge on its plan to increase tuition fees.
It was likely the last chance for an immediate resolution to the social crisis that has gripped the province for almost four months.
This is delusional.
Whew. I see Tom Mulcair managed to gallop into Alberta today, cast his eyes upon the darkness of the Oil Sands, and make his getaway without dropping the dreaded T word.
In his first-ever visit to the Alberta oilsands as NDP leader, Mulcair was about to substitute “tar” for “oil” when he hastily corrected himself.
“They’re bitumen sands because the chemicals are neither oil nor tar,” he said at a news conference hours after being taken on a tour of the mine and tailings pond reclamation process by Suncor Energy of its site in northern Alberta.
And without giving an inch.
