In this week’s Hill Times: does Judy Foote care about Holocaust denial?

— 03.01.2016 01:17 AM

Does Judy Foote care about racism and Holocaust denial?

She must. She’s a veteran of politics, and has been in the game for a couple decades, both in Ottawa and in her home province of Newfoundland. She won re-election in 2015 with 82 per cent of the vote. She has clearly been effective, or she wouldn’t be where she now is, which is sitting in the palatial offices of the Ministry of Public Services and Procurement across the river in Hull. She’s done pretty well.

Unfortunately for Foote, she is also answerable for Canada Post. Historically, the Minister of Public Services – or Public Works, as it was long known – has typically been responsible for that Crown corporation. It hasn’t been easy.

Canada Post, to most people in government – be they Liberal or be they Conservative – is a big pain in the ass. When I was Chief of Staff to the super-ministry that included Canada Post, we used to call them “the evil empire.”

Back then, we disapproved of Canada Post using taxpayer millions to advertise – they had no competitors in the home mail delivery business, I told their unctuous “CEO” once, so why does Canada Post need to advertise? They spent tax payer money on private boxes in sports arenas. They spent tax dollars putting Canada Post’s logo on golf balls and golf clubs. They refused to fly the Canadian flag at post offices in Quebec, for fear of upsetting the separatists. And so on.

In recent years, there’s been more of the same. They’ve tried to cut home delivery for millions of Canadians, and they’ve plopped mausoleum-like “community mailboxes” far from peoples’ homes, so that your 80-year-old grandmother is obliged to trod through mountainous snow banks to get her mail. They’ve reported millions in losses, while simultaneously paying their new CEO half a million bucks yearly – and bonuses of up to a third of his salary.

Oh, and they promote Holocaust denial and racism and homophobia and sexual assault.

It’s true. For quite some time now, Canada Post has been getting paid to distribute a tabloid newspaper called Your Ward News to tens of thousands of homes in Toronto. Your Ward News is edited by a creep named James Sears – who has in the past pleaded guilty to sexual assault, and lost his licence to practice medicine for sexually assaulting patients.

Among other things, Sears has lately started appearing in public with one of the leaders of Canada’s neo-Nazi movement, Paul Fromm. Sears is also an unabashed Hitler enthusiast, and has called the gas chambers at Auschwitz a “lie.” And he has used Your Ward News – and Canada Post – to giddily encourage anti-Semitism, racism and (occasionally) sexual assault.

In his most recent issue, Sears published a photo of Jesus Christ seemingly preparing to sodomize a naked woman clutching a crucifix. In the same issue, he likens Christ to Hitler, and approvingly writes: “Hitler saw his own campaign against the Jews as a Christian fight for truth and justice.” He entreats people to join his political movement, and “the war to expel the parasite,” by which he means Jews. He calls 9/11 a “lie” perpetrated by “ZioMarxists.” Oh, and he publishes one extraordinary glorification of misogyny and anti-Semitism beneath the headline: “THE LIBERAL PARTY’S MARXIST KOOL-AID IS SPIKED WITH SOPHIE TRUDEAU’S MENSTRUAL BLOOD.” That’s a quote.

For months, some of us – including our riding’s hard-working Liberal MP, Nate Erskine-Smith – have been attempting to get Judy Foote’s attention about all this, to no avail. Personally, I have contacted her “director of operations” on multiple occasions to try and get them to stop Canada Post’s willful promotion of hate and Holocaust denial. No response (until this week, that is, when I finally got fed up and tweeted that Foote was ultimately responsible for James Sears’ willing business partner, Canada Post – and he finally replied, tersely acknowledging my objection: “Yes. On Twitter. Thanks.” That’s it.)

As a result, James Sears continues to promote hatred against identifiable groups – still a crime in Canada – with impunity. The new edition of Your Ward News should by landing in 77,000 Toronto mailboxes sometime this week.

Like we said at the outset: Judy Foote sounds like an accomplished politician. She clearly knows how to get herself elected, and how to acquire power.

It’s time for her start using it. When an organization she’s responsible for starts accepting money to distribute hatred and Holocaust denial – when it facilitates criminal offences – she’d damn well better.

Because, you know, Judy Foote cares about this problem.

Doesn’t she?

 

 


Comments (14)

The Academy Awards are bollocks, like all award shows

— 02.29.2016 08:02 AM

They’re all mostly rigged, in my humble estimation, and are basically orgies in solipsism and exclusion. I never, ever watch award shows. I detest them. They’re crap.

However, I read on the Twitter machine this morning the following encouraging things:

Spotlight is about the importance of truth and justice, but also the critical importance of newspapers in achieving both.  To keep newspapers around, subscribe, right now, to the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star.

And to understand why Ms. Roessler is a big deal to me, watch her in the video below, in the band she used to play in.  The band was called Black Flag.


Comments (8)

I am a virus

— 02.26.2016 09:45 AM

Or my web site is, apparently. 

Many folks reporting they are getting virus warnings when they click on wwe.warrenkinsella.com. 

We had stripped out 100 lines of malicious code a couple days ago. It looks like they’ve crept back in. 

My apologies for the inconvenience. We are working quickly to fix. 


Comments (1)

Death is the cure of all disease

— 02.26.2016 08:39 AM

And, apparently, it’s now seen as a cure for other maladies by our elected representatives.  My quick reaction to that well-meaning but – sorry – fatally-flawed report by Parliamentarians yesterday:

There are myriad problems associated with the report, which I assume is why Canada’s impressive new Minister of Justice was so cautious in her response. Said she, properly: “We’re looking to ensure that we continue to take an empathetic approach, that we look to create balance in our approach that recognizes the autonomy of individuals, that recognizes the need to protect the vulnerable, that respects the conscience rights of medical practitioners, and that will take a little bit of time.”

It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say this, but I will: I don’t come to this difficult issue as a Roman Catholic. I approach it as a pro-choice progressive, and as the son of a physician who won the Order of Canada, in part, because of his work on the ethicality of euthanasia. As our Dad used to say to us around the kitchen table: “Doctors go to medical school to learn how to save lives, not end them. A whole new category of professionals will need to be trained and certified to euthanize people. And who will decide what is ‘terminal’?”

Therein lies the rub. Euthanasia for the “terminally ill” is dangerous, I think, because we don’t actually possess a working a definition of “terminal.” Jack Kevorkian, the “Dr. Death” who killed dozens of Americans until his own (perhaps timely) passing, defined terminal as “any disease that curtails life even for a day.”

Even a day? In the pro-death crowd, that’s actually considered conservative. The co-founder of the Hemlock Society defines it as “terminal old age.” Others declare a person terminal when death will occur in a “relatively short time.”

Given that we all start to die the moment we are born, you can perhaps see the problem here. One man’s terminal is another man’s weeks, or months, or years.

As a liberal, I have another problem with terminating those who are “terminal.” The overriding theme in every discussion of health care, nowadays, is cost. Politicians and bureaucrats — conservative ones in particular — are always obsessively looking for ways to contain health-care expenditures.

So, for example, after the passage of Oregon’s Measure 16 — which similarly legalized the oxymoronic “assisted suicide” — the state’s leading health bureaucrat declared such measures would be paid for as “comfort care” under the Oregon Health Plan. Which, coincidentally enough, provides medical coverage for hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who are poor.

Months later, Oregon then announced plans to cut back on health-care coverage for poor citizens. Killing off the sickly poor? Robustly funded. Helping them actually get better? Not so much.

Students of history will recall, here, that euthanasia – literally, “good death” – was the NSDAP’s first program of mass murder. It predated the Holocaust by a decade, in fact. The Nazis declared that their benign objective was eliminating “life unworthy of life.” That is, easing the mortal burden of Germans who had severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities – and who were similarly a financial burden on German society and the Nazi state. People liked it, at first.

And, before you are moved to quote Godwin’s Law to me, don’t.  Just don’t.

Because, you know, this and this.


Comments (21)