Friday Photography

This will be my first entry of Friday Photography on WordPress, and so in lieu of the interesting Canadian weather we have received, I have decided to go with a distinctly snowy thematic. Photographers are unknown unless otherwise credited below the photograph.

Pine line, by Simon Butterworth

with permission from Erich J. Harvey’s beautiful Flickr photostream on Vancouver.

by Gudak Sergej

David Frum On Senate Reform

I have to hand it to Mr.Frum. He’s able to make a very convincing argument for the recent actions of Mr.Harper, many of his points echoing my own. Although he writes in a very one-sided perspective, it isn’t difficult to juxtapose the Conservatives as the “lesser” of the many faults that lie in Canadian politics, particularly when we have an opposition so unwilling to take heed to the democratic reforms they purport to uphold.

It’s true that the Prime Minister gave the provinces years to hold elections so that he could appoint democratically selected senators. Also true is the massive partisan imbalance in the Senate that undermines the democracy that is supposed to provide the balance of power in Ottawa. Even after 18 appointments, the Conservatives are a woeful minority party in the Senate. Even as the opposition Liberals deride the process undertaken by Stephen Harper, Mr.Frum quips that at least the Conservatives are “a party with a leader chosen at an open convention.” The finishing argument:

With this week’s announcement, Harper has delivered one more reminder of what is most at stake in Canada’s next federal election. On one side are the parties of privilege and prerogative. The Liberals, NDP and Bloc tried to take power by connivance, not election. They finance themselves by extracting forced payments from the taxpayer, not by voluntary contribution.

They are content to see half of Parliament chosen by the prime minister at his sole whim — and to see that prime minister himself stealthily selected in a mysterious backroom negotiation.

On the other side is Canada’s only fully democratic party: a party with a leader chosen at an open convention, that governs because it won the most votes, that believes that parties should be financed by small but voluntary donations, and that wants all officeholders to owe their offices to the people. Seems like an easy choice to me.

Mr.Frum does sort of gloss over the troubled aspect of the fact that Mr.Harper is undertaking this so-called “reform” during a time in which he was forced to ask the Governor General to prorogue Parliament, something I took the party to task for here. It would be intellectually dishonest to assume that this move is every bit the actions of a man who is taking democracy reform to the next level. But by the same token, it would be just as wrong to apply to every act that the Conservatives take, a suspicion of sinister and underhanded motivations. As Mr.Frum points out, we’ve seen what the Liberals will do if unchecked by democratic restraints: they will fill the Senate entirely with Liberals. Entirely.

David Frum writes: Following Stéphane Dion’s attempt to take power via a clandestine deal, Harper and the Conservatives had every reason to fear that their two years of principled self-denial would profit only their opponents.

And I wrote only days before: So Stephen Harper’s Senate appointments are only hypocritical in that he held himself to a higher standard than his enemies for these many years.

Certainly the Conservatives have had to take off the gloves and wallow in the mud and get a little dirty. But it would be wrong to suggest this taints only the Conservatives, for finally becoming proactive in the face of unbending resistance, both to democratic reform, but more applicably to inevitably corrupt Liberal patronage.

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Related

David Asper of the National Post writes that this is the “lesser of two evils”. [Link]

Hate Crimes Against Catholics In Scotland?

One hears about hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs fairly frequently in the media, but how often does one think of bigotry associated with the Catholic religion? From an article in CBC this past summer:

While race remained the highest motivator, religion appeared to account for one-quarter of the police-reported hate crimes. Jewish-faith targets accounted for almost two-thirds of the incidents followed by Islamic targets at 21 per cent and Catholics with six per cent.

So certainly in Canada, where Catholicism is still the majority religion, Catholics are not frequently targeted. But the statistics show that it does exist. Even curiouser would be an article in the British Telegraph, which suggests that an age-old song “The Hokey Cokey” constitutes a hate crime toward Catholics. What is the Hokey Cokey [often called "Pokey" in Canada], you may ask? Well, if you are asking that question, then perhaps you and I have had radically different upbringings. From the time I was a knee-high, the song was a fairly common popular culture tune that I must have danced to at various school gatherings, recesses, even weddings. Come on now, you know the words:

“You put your right foot in,
You take your right foot out,
You put your right foot in,
And you shake it all about,
You do the Hokey Cokey,
And you turn yourself around,
Well that’s what it’s all about!”

But according to the Catholic Church and some Scottish politicians, the popular tune may constitute an act of religious hatred that has “disturbing” origins:

Critics claim that Puritans composed the song in the 18th century in an attempt to mock the actions and language of priests leading the Latin mass.

Now politicians have urged police to arrest anyone using the song to “taunt” Catholics under legislation designed to prevent incitement to religious hatred.

[...]

“This song does have quite disturbing origins. Although apparently innocuous, it was devised as an attack on and a parody of the Catholic mass.

“If there are moves to restore its more malevolent meaning then consideration should perhaps be given to its wider use.”

According to the church, the song’s title derives from the words “hocus pocus”.

The phrase is said to be a Puritan parody of the Latin “hoc est enim corpus meum” or “this is my body” used by Catholic priests to accompany the transubstantiation during mass.

Now I can’t speak for Canadian Catholics, but I greatly suspect that this song neither insults them or their religion. But it is quite interesting to see that even in a country like Scotland, there remain some religious tensions whereby Catholics feel persecuted and a great deal of animosity. Scottish Tories have said it’s unlikely anyone is using the song to create an “anti-Catholic” agenda, and point to the historical rivalry between football teams in Great Britain, and religious differences have become a kind of secondary means of taunting one’s rival.