…and he doesn’t get up off the mat, afterwards. Story here.

Her words here:

Don’t mess with this woman, little Con boys in short pants. She’ll make you regret it.

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Here is Bill C-51. Here is a bunch of commentary about it.

And here is your chance to pick the party with the position you like the best!

poll by twiigs.com

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You’ve read about this, I’m sure.

So, why didn’t the supposedly-expert authorities do this?

Question: why didn't cops keep tunnel intact and under surveillance, instead of filling it in and asking public for help? @metromorning

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 24, 2015

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42 for the Cons, 34 for the Grits. Hmm.

Looks like the CPC Quebec surge isn’t a myth, after all. Has happened.  Wow.

All weird, IMHO, when you look at “direction of the country” finding.

More here.

What’s your take, Dear Reader?

UPDATE: The impressive Dr. Coletto says this chart is the most interesting and, on reflection, he’s right: Harper has erased a 15-point Trudeau lead since August of last year. What’s even more interesting is this: it’s all happened before – ten years ago, when Paul Martin kicked off his Mad As Hell Tour. Even more, more interesting? Some of the folks from 2004-2005 are back running the show in 2015!

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If Sun News Network was still among the living, I’d have several chase producers asking me on today, to talk about the Ontario government’s new sexual education curriculum.

Lala and I had a vigorous debate about all of this yesterday morning, over espresso.  For your reading (dis)pleasure, I summarize my main points below.

• A qualifier, to acknowledge that what I experienced wasn’t what my peers experienced: I’m a doctor’s son.  Me and my brothers were having very open discussions about sex with our parents from an early age.  What they taught us, right from the start, was the importance of respect (for your partner) and knowledge (for yourself).
• Another qualifier: I don’t know what is in today’s announcement.  There were leaks to select media over the weekend, but we don’t know if those leaks are reliable, and if they represent the full picture.  I suspect they don’t.
• That all said, I offer the following.
• The debate has already started to follow the same bullshit trajectory that these things always follow – Left-Right, conservative-progressive, blab blah blah.  It’s a bunch of adults hollering at each other, while the kids sit largely on the sidelines, watching it all like it’s an ideological tennis match.  Or not watching at all.
• Personally, I favour the curriculum being very comprehensive, for the obvious reasons: teen pregnancies, STDs, sexual assaults, ignorance, discrimination.  All of those reasons, and more.
• But what I think doesn’t really matter.  What matters is what the kids think, because the curriculum is aimed at them.  And I am willing to bet that no shortage of adult experts, and adult educators, and adult academics, and adult parents were consulted.  But the kids, not so much.
• Thus, my point: the sex ed debate should be about technology, not ideology.  Because our kids aren’t waiting for us to have our little ideological debate.  They have been on the Internet for years, being exposed to notions about sex that are neither respectful nor knowledgeable.
• I almost don’t care, therefore, what is in the curriculum.  What I care about is that kids are able to access it, and explore it, in a way that works for them, ie., the Internet.  The Internet is private and modern; a teacher in the classroom is neither.
• Put the new curriculum all over the Internet.  Make it creative and interactive and relevant.  Make it ubiquitous enough to help overwhelm the harmful, hateful shit that is out there.
• And, yes, of course, teach it in the classroom, too.  But use Lala’s idea: have teams of impressive, energetic, smart young people go into classrooms to teach it.  Not Palaeolithic old farts who the kids already see as irrelevant.

Kids who aren’t even in school yet are regularly accessing sexually explicit stuff that old farts like me (and perhaps you) didn’t even see, or hear about, until we were adults.  The world has changed, duh.

The sex ed curriculum needs to change with it.  It needs to be for, and about, the intended audience.  Not a bunch of old people who haven’t had intercourse since Nixon was president.  Technology, not ideology: that’s the key.

In the Internet era, the notion that any kid waits to hear about sex ed from a teacher/parent is comical. #onpoli http://t.co/FF6NfjEkC6

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 22, 2015

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I tweeted this, so some guy tweeted back this.  I read it fast, so I tweeted this.

Someone tweeted I was a partisan apologist. When I first read it, I thought it said artisan proctologist.

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) February 21, 2015

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Here.

 

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It’s a Kerouac line, adapted for the circumstances. Fits.

Lately, I have been peering at this snapshot taken by Eric Grenier, like someone does when they are lost, and they are squinting at a map at the side of the road. Night falling, apprehension rising.

No single poll is reliable anymore. They get it wrong, a lot. This graph is probably different, however, because it is a rendering of a lot of polls, aggregated. It’s therefore harder to dismiss. Thus, I gaze at it, trying to unlock its mysteries.

 

You can divine its meaning as well as I can. You don’t have to be an expert. Among other things, it tells us:

• Trudeau has dropped, but not dramatically;
• Harper has risen, and inexorably; and
• Mulcair isn’t Jack Layton.

That’s pretty simplistic, but so is politics.  Harper’s wiggly line is good, Mulcair’s is bad, and Trudeau’s is so-so.  Ipso facto, the campaign matters.

That’s a cliché, but it’s also true.  That’s why Liberals – increasingly nervous about assorted things – have lately taken to repeating the mantra that the campaign matters, and the pre-season doesn’t.  (Maybe.)

To illustrate their point, they cite 1993.  Kim Campbell was the most popular Prime Minister in the history of polling, and Jean Chretien was being measured for a political pine box.  The campaign came, and everything changed.  (True.)

There’s a debate raging about this over on my Facebook page this morning.  In response to one commenter making the 1993-2015 comparison, an edited response from another commenter:

• Kim Campbell was untested, Stephen Harper is not;
• Jean Chretien had John Rae et al., Justin Trudeau has the folks who cooked up both Eve Adams and Sudbury;
• The issues mix favours Harper (security/economy) in a way it never favoured Campbell (jobs/change);
• The aggregate polling trend is presently slow and steady CPC upward growth, and slow and steady LPC erosion;
• Trudeau is decidedly not Chretien.

And that last one is the big one, as we attempt to divine the meaning of Grenier’s squiggles on a computer screen: if you were writing a book, a la Kerouac, and you were looking for someone to play Jean Chretien (Kerouac and Chretien were distantly related, by the way), who would you pick?

Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper?

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For reasons of September 9, 2011, I have found this little boy’s story to be very difficult to read about, or hear about.  But if you want to help, somehow, here is how you can contribute to the funeral costs.

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Pat Martin, Canada’s own Calvin Klein!

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