In my sadness over the death of Nelson Mandela, and because I'm so tired, I forgot that Friday was the anniversary of a monumental Canadian tragedy. That on a snowy day in Montreal twenty four years ago, an angry man with a gun stormed through an engineering school and killed fourteen young women. Fourteen young women who were killed in Canada’s worst mass shooting were remembered on Friday amid repeated calls for more to be done to eradicate violence against women.
He's been trying to soften his image by posing as a friend of poor women and children. He told a U.N. group on maternal health that "action trumps rhetoric.". His stooge John Baird denounced forced marriage, and warned of the health dangers for young women who get pregnant. Statistics provided by Baird's office show girls under 15 years old are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s, and children born to mothers under 18 years old are 60 per cent more likely to die in their first year of life. Childbirth is the leading cause of death for girls 15 to 18 years old. But today his foul Con regime made it clear that providing those young women and girls with safe abortions is out of the question. Even if they've been RAPED.
When I came home from work this evening, the CN tower was still glowing pink in honour of the first ever International Day of the Girl Child. A day to honour all the girls in the world, and remember all those whose lives are brutalized or diminished by discrimination, and other horrors like child marriage. Approximately 70 million young women today were married before age 18, according to the UN, which notes that child marriage denies a girl her childhood, disrupts her education, limits her opportunities, increases her risk of being a victim of violence and abuse, and jeopardizes her health. But all I could think about tonight was two of those girls.
Uh oh. More evidence that everything young isn't good. We've got the youngest Speaker of the House of Commons.
But he's an anti-choice fanatic, and a homophobe.
And how do I know this since the MSM won't tell me? Because he's got the Betty CrockerPopey Pancakes Campaign Life Seal of Approval.
Great eh? No doubt he'll rename Question Period the Magisterium Hour, sprinkle Biblical quotations into his rulings. And any opposition MP's who dare defy him will be commanded to say 15-hundred Hail Mary's, and flog themselves with a prickly cord.
Oh boy. It may well be that Stephen Harper is just tossing a symbolic bone at his rabid Christianist base. While preventing Scheer from voting to ban abortion, or jail gay people, or ban rock music, or kite flying on Sunday etc etc.
McCormack’s case is a sign of the true desperation of women in this country. She said she believed she was only 14 weeks along, although the examination of the remains concluded it was more likely 20-25. She is already a mother of more than one child, one still a toddler. But financially she was cut off from any choice she wanted to make about how many people she wanted in her family, unable to procure an abortion she couldn’t afford, and now facing criminal penalties for taking the only option left to her.
And I look at the never ending hateful war on gay people.
I hate to see ANY religious fanatic in ANY position of authority.
Because let's not kid ourselves, a version of what's happening in America COULD happen here. It's that big, that crazy, and that wacko dangerous.
Oh well. I'm prepared to give Scheer a chance to show that he knows the difference between a democracy and a theocracy. To show he totally understands that we need someone who puts his God's commands before the commands of the Canadian people, like we need a Pope, or another Jason Kenney.
But I'm warning him eh?
If I detect the slightest signs of satanic Con activities in the Temple of the People.
I'm calling in this guy...
Oh Great Polar Bear Monkey God of the Great White North. If only we could pull the plug on this nightmare that easily.
A religious fanatic presiding over a Canadian Parliament.
I'm glad to see the police chiefs of this country have sent a strong message to gun lovers everywhere. We are not Amerika. And we support the long gun registry
Despite the Con attempts to intimidate them.
And Edmonton Constable Randy Kuntz's ridiculous "survey."
Kuntz organized a straw poll of officers earlier this year through a police member's forum called Blue Line. He said 92 per cent of the 2,631 respondents to his "simple survey" voted in favour of scrapping the registry.
Which I don't believe for a moment. Because I wouldn't trust the gun lobby as far as I can spit. I trust the facts. The long-gun registry does work. It does save lives.
And when these gun nutters say it doesn't make a difference when police officers are called to intervene in some problem, I beg to differ. So do the officers who use it 14-thousand times a DAY. And so does she.
A family contacted their local police because the father was in a depressed state and they wanted the police to remove all of the firearms from their home. Family members told the police what firearms were in the house. Local police then checked the long gun registry online, which revealed an additional 21 long guns in the home that other family members knew nothing about. Police obtained a warrant and removed all the guns.
The long gun registry costs Canadians $4.1 million a year to operate to track nearly 7 million guns — about 60 cents a year per firearm. With 100,000 women and children leaving their homes in Canada each year fleeing violence, and almost 600 missing and murdered Aboriginal women, the long gun registry is an essential national investment. Does it save lives? On the facts alone: Yes.
And quite frankly on this issue I'd rather hear from women than any other group of Canadians. Because they are so often the victims.
Women have the most to lose if the long-gun registry is abandoned. During domestic violence calls, police use the registry to check if a long-gun is on site. Statistics from the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee found firearms to be present in 47% of domestic homicides in 2007. A woman is 12 times more likely to be murdered if a gun is involved in domestic violence, and the guns most commonly used in domestic violence are long guns, not handguns.
There is a problem with the registry because the Cons have been encouraging gun lovers not to register their guns, so the data is being compromised. We're losing track of guns all over the country.
But the answer is to crack down on those too dumb, too lazy, or too paranoid to fill out a form.
Not throw out a useful tool, and turn our country into Amerika.
I admit I want to discourage gun use in Canada. Especially in urban areas. I hate societies full of weapons. I hate the fact that they threaten police officers, paramedics, firefighters, and ordinary citizens.
P.S. Gun lovers please spare me your comments. I was willing to argue with you to try to find a compromise. But you wanted all or nothing. So you can have NOTHING...
As you know I like to use ridicule as a blunt weapon against Stephen Harper and his gang of political thugs.
Because I want to do to them what those foul Con bullies have done to so many decent Canadians starting with Stephane Dion.
And because in the dumb brutish country we are becoming, I find laughter is the best medicine.
But there are some things even I can't laugh about. Like this most recent assault on the lives of women.
In the report presented by HIV-positive activists, researchers, AIDS organizations and human rights and HIV/AIDS lawyers, Canada received a failing grade in recognizing the needs of women and girls to protect themselves from HIV and to manage HIV infection.
In Canada, the number of infected women continues to rise from just over 11 per cent of new infections prior to 1999 to over 26 per cent in 2008, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
While Canada received a middling C grade for diagnosis, prevention and education, Canada received an F for stigma and discrimination.
And why is this happening? Because the Cons don't know what they're doing? No. They know what they are doing, and it's all because of their IDEOLOGY.
That's why they attacked the words "women's equality" the moment they came to office. That's why they killed the Court Challenges program. That's why they refused to fund abortions in poor countries. That's why they don't fund gay projects. That's why they went after KAIROS and Rights and Democracy. That's why they are letting a Canadian child soldier rot in Guantanamo.
That's why they are turning their backs on people with AIDS. Just like they did four years ago.
And of course, that's why they are trying to gut the census. It's not about Harper's legacy. It's not about trying to cover up crime statistics. It's ALL about their AmeriCon ideology, and feeding their rabid base.
Attacking women's equality, trying to make gay families invisible, opening up another wedge issue. As it was in the beginning so it is now.
"It is criminal neglect to ignore the plight of those affected by HIV and dying of AIDS now. However, the Government of Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not seem to hear their pleas for help."
The sooner progressive Canadians understand that deadly alien ideology, stop chasing shadows, and unite to confront it, the sooner we will defeat the Cons.
And of course the sooner I will stop mocking them.
