Present view. Little flag on our swim dock.

Hey, Canada Day.

People always say their country is the best country in the world. Canadians, too.

But I don’t know if that is true. I haven’t been to every country in the world – and I don’t think there’s anyone else who has, either.

So we don’t know. Belize could be the best country in the world. Who knows.

Canada is a good country, but – like the others – imperfect. We pollute, we waste, we do bad things. We have children living in the streets, we have children who go to bed hungry.

Our ongoing indifference to those who were here first is a disgrace. As Dad to a smart indigenous girl, I believe that we will never be great until we remedy that. We will never be a great country – or perhaps even a country – until we pay the debt we owe First Nations.

So, we are not great. We are okay. We are not bad. When we compare ourselves to the alternatives – like, say, America, which is anything but great, now, and for obvious reasons – we are better than those alternatives.

Mostly, we are a work in progress. We are on the way.

So, I will acknowledge this birthday, this anniversary, in the most Canadian of ways – half-heartedly. Fist up, halfway. Quietly.

We are not great. We are not perfect. But we are better than many of the alternatives.

Because we’ve been to a lot of the alternatives, and all of us keep coming back to this patch of rock and ice and dirt.

Happy you-know-what, eh.

Saying she was “bleeding badly from a facelift.” Saying she had a “low I.Q.” and was “crazy.”  Saying her partner was “psycho.”

This bastard is, truly, the scum of the Earth.  He is human garbage.  Just when you think he cannot sink lower into the primordial ooze, he does.

On a day like this one, all you can do is shake your head and sing along.

Here.

The Kinsellas said they were alerted to the article by friends. “We were shocked at reading such a blatant threat,” said Lisa Kinsella. “Then obviously we were concerned.… We read it as not just a direct threat to us, but a call to action to harm Warren and myself.”

The Kinsellas asked the Toronto Police Service to lay charges, but they were told the article was insufficient to support a criminal prosecution. “They said it was simply James Sears’ opinion,” Warren Kinsella stated.

He said that he and his wife have experienced “ongoing harassment within this hate rag, and now this threat.”

He was particularly critical of Toronto police, who declined to lay charges on the alleged personal threat, or to prosecute Sears on earlier occasions for promoting hate.

“They don’t care in this city about anti-Semitism, white supremacy or bigotry,” he said.

Warren Kinsella, who described himself as “a partisan Liberal,” said he was also critical of the provincial attorney general, who has withheld consent for a hate prosecution and has failed to provide adequate resources to address hate crimes and collect hate crime statistics.

Your Ward News has been a lightning rod for controversy for the past two years.

The tabloid-sized newsletter, which is also available online, describes itself as “the world’s largest anti-Marxist publication.”

Its critics say it is inspired by Nazism and traffics in anti-Semitism, misogyny and homophobia, while attacking minorities of all types.

Full story here.

Snippet:

These investors, trade experts and government officials are still stunned by an event that got next to no attention in the U.S. but was an earthquake out here — and a gift that will keep on giving America’s allies pain and China gain for years to come. That was Trump’s decision to tear up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal in his first week in office — clearly without having read it or understanding its vast geo-economic implications.

(Trump was so ignorant about TPP that when he was asked about it in a campaign debate in November 2015 he suggested that China was part of it, which it very much is not.)
Trump simply threw away the single most valuable tool America had for shaping the geo-economic future of the region our way and for pressuring China to open its markets. Trump is now trying to negotiate trade openings with China alone — as opposed to negotiating with China as the head of a 12-nation TPP trading bloc that was based on U.S. values and interests and that controlled 40 percent of the global economy.
It is hard to think of anything more stupid. And China’s trade hard-liners are surely laughing in their sleeves.

Because that’s what the panel investigating Canada Post’s delivery of the violence-promoting hate rag Your Ward News did this morning. And it was what I and others had warned them about, and what they promised never to do. 

If someone now gets hurt or targeted, it’ll be on their heads. 

I plan to raise Hell about this. Stay tuned. 

Just extraordinary findings by the Pew people. 

Someone said to me last night: “I hate America.” I was astonished this person, in particular, would say such a thing. 

Apparently they’re not alone.