Rona Ambrose is Ticked Off!

Or The Harper Party Wants Your Support!

Health Minister Rona Ambrose is upset because her department has given the OK for some heroin addicts to receive their drugs through a special program.

The Harper Party wants YOUR support to stop this from happening again.

Now if this confuses you that’s understandable, since Health Minister Rona Ambrose, the person in charge of the Ministry of Health, who has the final say so on things like this let it happen.

At least your former colleague Bev Oda had the sense to find the piece of paper and write NOT on it.  But then again, that didn’t work out so well either, did it?

I have no doubt that Ms. Rona and her pals in the Harper Party will be shouting about the bureaucracy and how they did this without her approval, and it’s getting a bit tiring.

It seems like just yesterday when our friends in the Harper Caucus were ranting and raving about accountability and how the governing Liberals weren’t doing it.  They wanted heads on platters for every crime, real or imagined that they could sling at the government, but now the shoe is on the other foot.  Can’t blame the Liberals anymore, can’t blame the NDP either, oooh wait a minute…

Yes!  The new sign up to stop things page at the Harper Party website is up.  They want you to stop the NDP and the Liberals from letting this like this happen in the 2015 elections!

Sorry folks, no link, I’m not supporting the current cast of clowns in Ottawa.

For a party that ran on accountability among other things the Harper Party has been anything but accountable.  From Bev Oda’s infamous “▼NOT” to her $16.00 OJ to Peter Penashue and his difficulties with what is a proper election expense on down to Dean Del Mastro and his issues with election expenses...

No matter what happens, it is always someone else’s fault and then the Harper Loyalists stomp their feet and point in all directions but not one of them has the chutzpah to step up and say “I messed up” and take the heat for it.

Rona Ambrose, you messed up.

You were in charge of the Ministry of Health when this happened.

You can point fingers across the aisle all you want Rona, but you were the one in charge… You let it happen.

Look, the one thing that bureaucrats hate to do is to make decisions.  The Ottawa Citizen has a wonderful piece on what happens when you ask a federal department a question, you can read it here.

Frankly I’d be amazed if the piece of paper that would provide heroin to addicts as part of their substance abuse program didn’t pass in front of Rona Ambrose’s nose if not at the very least through her office.  No bureaucrat would want that target hung of their back.

The bottom line is that we all want the same thing.  We want people to stop using these drugs.  If a doctor wants to provide safe heroin to help someone end their addiction isn’t that a good thing?  If we have safe injection sites where addicts can be counselled on how to end their addiction, isn’t that a good thing?

In the mean time, we’re stuck with a government with a belief that punishment or the threat of punishment will stop the bad people from using drugs and selling drugs.

It hasn’t worked so far.

And we have a government that is focused on diversion and distraction when they screw up.  After all the yelling and carrying on your people did about the lack of accountability in the previous government Stephen, when are you going to put your money where your mouth is and start making your people accountable too?

Maybe we could start with Rona?

Cheers! BC

Pulling the Veil Off of Hate

Daniel Patrick Moynihan - "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."

You may have seen them, ever since the controversial Charter of Quebec Values surfaced I’ve been seeing them more often.  People are sharing links to venom spewing websites via social media such as Facebook. 

I saw one such post today, and a couple of people who I really know, as opposed to “Facebook Friends” commented on the link.  These are normal people who most of us would have no problem sitting down to coffee with, and yet they are totally against these Muslim women who are not being forced to remove their veils before getting on a plane.

The story revolves around a video shot at Montreal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport where two women were apparently allowed to board a flight without showing their faces.

The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-3frv4tnx8

In the video we see a man interact with the representative at the counter, and then we see three apparently Muslim women passing by the same representative without a glance.  Did I mention the obvious edit?  We don’t get to see the women interact with the representative at all.

According to Salon.com these women would have already undergone several security checks before getting to this area in the airport.  The article also says that Air Canada, the airline this women were travelling on has a policy of having women who wear religious garments that cover their face brought to a private screening area to allow them to remove their facial covering for Photo ID comparison.

Was this done before this point?  Was it done after they entered the Gate?  We don’t know, the video doesn’t show that. 

Now the website makes it sound like these women weren’t screened at all, that they were permitted to just walk through the airport from the front door to the airplane without ever being screened.  Does that sound reasonable to you?

The article also has a few other still pictures of veiled Muslim women showing their ID, supposedly Passports.  I’ll share them with you.

Look carefully at the Passport.  Her face is uncovered, her hair is uncovered… what does this suggest to you?  Could it be that she has no issue with having a bare faced picture taken for her Passport but won’t appear in public without a veil?  Do you think she would have an issue with being taken aside to a private area to have an airline representative ensure that she is the same person that appears in her Passport?

Or maybe this is just a put up job to inflame emotions.

Another picture.

  

The photo is named “pakistan-vi” from the website I took it from.  If you look carefully, you will see their faces are uncovered on their ID cards.  Now I was unable to find anything in particular on this photo, other than a portion of it (the two ladies on the right) was used in a news story from Saudi Arabia telling how women there would be allowed to vote and that they would be able to obtain ID cards such as these so the a female election official can verify their identity.

Yet another photo.

This one was helpfully named “afghan_election_gi_gal-vi”.  The website infers that these women are holding Passports as well.

The same photo is found at an Australian news program called PM .  It is captioned “Afghan women show cards at polling centre in 2011”.

Last Picture.

 

OK it’s two pictures.  The one on the left is from that same website, the one on the right, I pinched from a news story on the net.  I blanked out the information on Stuart’s licence, but I left enough to show the left picture has obviously been altered, they even went so far as to obscure the state it was from.  The burqa clad woman on the left, her image is crooked on the licence, Stuart’s is nice and straight.  Stuart’s signature looks like a scanned image that is printed onto the card, Fatima’s looks like it was hand written on the signature tape that used to be used years ago.

Finally look at the date of issue.  Although Stuart’s card is older, it looks far more up to date than Fatima’s.  And Fatima’s card?  It appears to have been lifted from YATAHONGA.com, a French humour site.  I looked, it’s not there anymore… must not have been that funny I guess.

I almost forgot, New Jersey does not allow face covering to be worn for your driver’s licence.

 

Look, the guy who has the site where I picked these images from is allowed to have an opinion.  You might agree with him, I do not.

BUT, he should not be allowed to use false images and misrepresentations to support his flimsy argument based on a chopped up video.

You are not entitled to your own facts.

In reality, I’m no fan of the burqa, but if a woman wants to belong to a religion that requires that she wear one, it is not my issue.  The flip side to that is that if a government mandates that women must wear items like this, I do have an issue with that.

I believe in the separation of Church and State.  I don’t want someone’s religion, anyone’s religion telling me how to live.  But the separation of Church and State cuts both ways and I do not want the government to tell me what religions I am allowed to follow nor do I want them telling religions how to run their belief.

By the way, the woman with the Passport, it was a set up job in 2007 by the Sun Newspaper in the UK.

And the video is from 2010, when it was brought to John Baird’s attention he had an investigation started into what actually happened.  Since we never heard about it, we can only suppose that:

a)    There was nothing to the story and so the press let it slide or

b)   The Harper Party is in bed with Muslim Extremists.

Any bets?

BC

I'd be remiss if I didn't thank a Facebook Friend who pointed out that one of the pictures that this website also used was of Muslim women in line to vote.  Thank you very much P.

PS: I intentionally did not include a link to the “venom spewing site”.  I’m not going to drive any business their way.  If you really want it, let me know and I’ll send it to you.  BC