If it’s Wildrose’s “conscience,” get ready for social chaos:

Then there’s “conscience rights.” The Wildrose policy book says government should “implement legislation protecting the ‘conscience rights’ of health care professionals.” The policy doesn’t spell out what that means, but when party delegates voted for the policy they put it in the context of a health-care worker – who is against birth control – being allowed to refuse to fill a prescription for the morning-after pill.

And Smith, it seems, wants to take conscience rights one step further to include marriage commissioners.

In August, responding to a questionnaire from the Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association, she wrote “the Wildrose will ensure conscience rights for marriage commissioners and health professionals. This would ensure the protection of personal expression for individuals, while also ensuring that personal beliefs are respected for all Albertans.”

Again, Smith was vague, not specifying what conscience rights would mean for marriage commissioners, but when used in the past the term has referred to allowing marriage commissioners to refuse to perform civil ceremonies for same-sex couples. It smacks of state-sanctioned discrimination and a Saskatchewan court has deemed the idea unconstitutional.

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Of course they would.

And, if I were still home, would I vote Alberta PC for the first time in my life to stop Wildrose from seizing power?

Of course I would.

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For North American conservatives, there are two victories prized most: George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore in 2000, and Stephen Harper’s trouncing of Michael Ignatieff in 2011.

In the fights between conservatives and liberals, those are the two that the Right cherish. Against all odds, conservatives humiliated liberals (in the latter), or seized ultimate power from them (in the former). For conservatives, 2000 and 2011 were historic.
The Bush and Harper election conquests are alike in another way, of course: Both remain tainted by allegations of election fraud.

In 2000, Bush “won” the presidential race with 271 electoral college votes to vice-president Al Gore’s 266. But Bush didn’t really win at all. In raw vote, Gore, with just under 51 million votes, received half a million more votes than Bush. Bush ended up “winning” because seven conservative jurists on the U.S. Supreme Court halted a crucial recount of ballots cast in Florida, thereby ensuring that all of the state’s 25 electoral college votes would be awarded to Bush, not Gore.

More Americans wanted Gore as their president, but that didn’t matter to the seven judges, who stopped the recount that non-partisan experts say would have won Gore the presidency.

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This pic was taken by a Postmedia photog (I think) during Dwight Duncan’s budget speech. The Ontario PCs decided to vote against it before they read it; the Ontario NDP have said they’ll vote against it, and are acting like they haven’t read any of it either.

We don’t want an election, but we’ll sure as Hell be ready for it if and when it comes.

In the meantime, who can spot Your Humble Narrator?

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I first heard from Fern Hill a few months ago. I had posted stuff about Tim Hudak’s anti-choice views. Fern Hill wanted credit for discovering Tim Hudak’s views. Quite a few of us knew that already, but whatever.

During the election, Fern Hill was the abortion blogger. If someone said something about abortion, she was all over it. I don’t recall her linking to Henry Morgentaler’s statement that late term abortions – around 24 weeks – is something with which he has ethical problems, however.  She said if you think the world needs fewer abortions, not more, you were part of the “fetus lobby,” quote unquote.

After that, she hectored people to vote for her in one of those stupid blogger award things. I never participate in those contests, because they make Robocalls look ethical and scientific. To Fern Hill, getting a blogger award is a big deal, however.  I started to sense that she didn’t have much of a life.

Anyway. In February, I saw that Fern Hill had gotten mixed up with the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who hang out on Free Dominion. She called the founder of the crypto-fascist web site her “good friend,” quote unquote.

I tried to talk her out of that, and – as with all such attempts – Fern Hill dismissed and mocked me. That’s around the time that I took a link to her off my web site.  She’d become as extreme as those she regularly attacked.

Now, she’s in a fight with pretty much every progressive blogger. She said she wanted off their aggregator, so they removed her. She has now taken to screeching about the fact that they removed her.  Seriously.

Bottom line: she’s an idiot. And, as the screen cap below shows, she thinks it’s A-OK to play footsie with the Far Right.

It isn’t.

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Just saw a guy coming into St. Mike’s Easter Mass wearing a French Connection U.K. sweatshirt. If I were the priest, I’d punch him in the face.

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It’s always dangerous to regard “the national newspaper” as having any insight whatsoever into the nation. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, they do.

The grey old Globe and Mail has recently pronounced that, generally, West beats the East. And, specifically, Quebec is Loserville.

Exhibit One: Here’s Prof. Jeffrey Simpson, under the headline “Canada’s political reversal is complete,” declaring that Calgary is now the political centre of Canada, and Montreal is within the Ninth Circle of Hell.

“Since the late 1980s, Canadian politics has been shaped, more than anything else, by the dialectics between Montreal and Calgary (which is the West’s) political centre,” declared Simpson, possibly wearing a Stetson as he did so. “After being in opposition for so long, Calgary is now in power — and after having been in power for so long, Montreal is now in opposition.”

Exhibit Two: Margaret Wente, another charter member of the Globe punditocracy, has decided that the West is Boffo, and Quebec is stink-o. Writing about the pugilistic Liberal MP Justin Trudeau, Wente — who has lived for decades in the shadow of the CN Tower, and wouldn’t know what a Richardson ground squirrel was if it alighted on her plate at a Bay Street bistro — proclaimed thusly: “(Justin Trudeau is) from Quebec, which is a fatal liability. The economic and political power of the country have all gone West.”

Exhibit Three: Gordon Pitts, an actual Westerner, wrote a lengthy exegesis in the Globe, declaring that there has been a “a critical exodus” from Quebec, and that “corporate Canada’s heart now beats in the West.”

Got all that? Calgary good, Montreal bad. West the summit of all wisdom and power, East wants in, etc.

Now, it’s boring when columnists write about other columnists. And it’s particularly boring when columnists pick on the Glib and Frail. That’s something Maclean’s head whiner, Paul Wells, does all the time, and it’s hard to get more tedious than him.

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…is the cause of the other.

Me? My view’s unchanged: he has too much baggage, and he couldn’t lift the party out of third place when our competition was Ms. Turmel. We need new faces, new blood.

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You decide.

Danielle Smith has some explaining to do, however.

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