Did I Say May 21? Sorry, I Meant October 21

Think you dodged The Rapture Saturday? Think again:

 

California preacher Harold Camping said Monday his prophecy that the world would end was off by five months because Judgment Day actually will come on Oct. 21.
Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before the Earth was destroyed, said he felt so terrible when his doomsday prediction did not come true that he left home and took refuge in a motel with his wife. His independent ministry, Family Radio International, spent millions — some of it from donations made by followers — on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.
But Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.
Saturday was “an invisible judgment day” in which a spiritual judgment took place, he said. But the timing and the structure is the same as it has always been, he said.

Now it may well be that this guy is a crazy nut and that we're giving him way too much attention. Nonetheless, people buy into this, and when people are convinced God is about to bring about the end of the world, there's no telling how that might influence their behaviour (case in point). Therefore, there's probably some value in exposing Camping's nonsense.
Clearly Camping is a fringe figure as far as Christians are concerned. Mind you, the criticism from most Christians seems to be "oh, no one can know when Judgment Day will occur", meaning most believe Judgement Day will occur - we just don't know when.
To me, that creates a picture of God not as a loving figure, but a rather vengeful one: a god who would save only those he deems worthy and vanquish to an eternity of torture those deemed unworthy. Living a good life, being a kind, loving, and generous person, but worshipping the wrong god - or not worshipping any god - is still enough to book your ticket to Hell.
Anyway, if you can handle it, here's the very long explanation from Harold Camping:
 

 

Herald Column: Helmet Laws & The Nanny-State

My latest Calgary Herald column looks at the debate over whether Alberta needs a law mandating helmet use for ATVs. I argue that we do not:

 

...The Alberta government has been promising for almost three years to introduce a law mandating helmet use, but such a bill remains nowhere in sight.
The province quite reasonably says it wants "effective and enforceable legislation", but the ongoing delays have proved even more embarrassing with the release new research on the scope and the cost of ATV injuries in Alberta.
Calgary trauma surgeon Dr. Richard Buckley describes a “disease of bad choices”, which has led to the majority of the 79 ATV-related deaths over the last ten years, specifically young men who ride ATVs helmetless and drunk.
Of course, one-half of that equation already is illegal: the criminal code prohibitions on impaired driving apply to all-terrain vehicles.
If criminal code sanction is not enough to deter foolish young men from consuming alcohol before riding, what makes us think that helmet laws will be any more effective?
For example, despite the fact that Nova Scotia has a mandatory helmet law, a 2002 study found that when it came to those suffering ATV-related injuries, only 16 per cent were wearing helmets.
Conversely, a 2007 study on ATV injuries found that for 2004-2005, B.C. had the second-lowest rate of ATV injury hospitalizations amongst all provinces. This was before B.C. implemented a helmet law.
Ontario had the lowest rate, and yes, Ontario has a mandatory helmet law. However, that didn’t stop Ontario’s ATV-related fatalities from doubling just two years later.
The issue is complex, but the mere fact that a province without a helmet law can enjoy low ATV injury rates while high injury rates can persist in provinces with helmet laws leads one to the inescapable conclusion that such a law is not nearly as effective or important as proponents claim.
There are also those who would look at this issue through the lens of cost, specifically the cost to the health care system – i.e. the taxpayer – from treating ATV injuries.
Dr. Buckley’s study puts the figure for a ten-year period at $65-million, or $6.5-million annually. Whether a helmet law would cut significantly into that is debatable, but any savings would certainly be offset by the costs of implementing and enforcing such a law.
But once we concede that government can and must criminalize behaviour that is likely to incur a cost of some sort to the public purse – behaviour that is not putting anyone else at risk – where does it all end?
Shall we calculate a price tag on the head injuries caused by falls or motor vehicle collisions? Are we really going to mandate helmets for climbing ladders or driving sedans?
How much further should we go?  Heavy drinkers and heavy smokers and heavy eaters all exact a toll on the health care system. One remains free to eat, drink, and smoke to one’s content. 
What about the cost of, say, treating STDs? Mandatory condom use becomes just as logical as mandatory helmet use when the rationale is based on the mere existence of universal health care.
If anything, one could make an argument that the public health system is part of the problem. Perhaps people might take more accountability for their own actions if they themselves were responsible for the costs incurred by their own stupidity.
Foolish people are always going to make foolish decisions, but the ones which pose a risk to others are the ones which law enforcement need to prioritize. That does not include someone riding an ATV around his property without a helmet. We end up creating the absurd situation in which the offender is both the criminal and the victim.
Protecting people from themselves is the essence of the nanny-state. Helmet laws are a giant step in that direction.

Herald Column: The Radical Harper Cometh?

My latest Calgary Herald column looks at the hope/fear that with a majority government, Stephen Harper will take a sharp turn to the right - epsecially on social issues. I remain unconvinced:

 

...Initiatives such as eliminating the long-gun registry, scrapping party subsidies, addressing the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, and reforming the Senate may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's hardly tantamount to a "cold new dawn", to quote the ever-hysterical Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick.

 

Those expecting a radically different Stephen Harper are ignoring three obvious implications of the recent election:

 

1.       After five years of governing, Harper was rewarded with a majority. Surely that must be seen as a vindication of his governing style.
2.       Harper's majority was largely contingent on a remarkable breakthrough in the Greater Toronto Area. I'm assuming Harper's future plans involve retaining those seats.
3.       The Conservatives lost a number of seats in Quebec, and presumably hopes to win them back next time around.

 

Clearly for the Prime Minister, he will be seeking a balance between the sorts of policies he'd like to pursue and the political realities that could preclude a repeat Conservative victory in four years.

 

Under no reasonable calculation would that in any way include an issue like abortion, but that's no barrier it seems to the delusions of the oddly overlapping forces of optimism and dread.

 

Prior to the election, a number of pro-choice groups warned that a Harper majority would threaten abortion rights. The aforementioned Heather Mallick wrote in a rather shrill and error-filled piece for the UK Guardian that, "The Evangelist Christian right … will now demand an end to a number of things, including abortion rights." 

 

Well, one can demand whatever one might like. One could, say, demand that batty left-wing columnists be publicly flogged, but that doesn't mean that the government is under any obligation to do anything about it.

 

Yet, it is true that the Evangelical Christian right is at the very least more optimistic.

 

The Toronto Star managed to dig up someone by the name of David Krayden who leads something called the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies. I'm not sure what makes him so newsworthy other than the fact that he is helping to advance a political narrative.

 

Krayden clearly wants to see the abortion issue re-opened, despite the fact that he has the bar set rather low. He told the Star, ``Perhaps Stephen Harper would consider a commission of some sort to examine the abortion laws in this country".

 

Perhaps.

 

Perhaps though, the Prime Minister has little time for the likes of David Krayden.

 

Prior to the election, of the leaders of Canada's evangelical religious right, Charles McVety, told the Globe and Mail that Harper's stand on abortion had alienated religious conservatives. McVety said there was "no energy out there" when it came to campaigning for the Tories and warned that apathetic social conservatives could cost Harper his majority.

 

Well we don't know whether McVety's flock turned out to vote, but we do know that Harper did get his majority. By what calculation then would Harper feel he owes this constituency any favours?

 

Of course, we really won't know how Harper plans to govern with a majority until he actually does so.  Who knows, maybe the Mallicks and McVetys of the world will get their hell/utopia - there's just no rational reason to think so.

Heather's Head Explodes

No doubt the majority government secured by the Harper Conservatives has left the Canadian left feeling rather despondent.

 

Much of that, in my view, is overblown; there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about how the Conservatives have governed and will govern, but fears of a hard right hidden agenda being sprung on Canadians seems absurd.

 

Clearly, though, for those who would like to see Liberal and NDP policies being fully and quickly implemented, the prospect of four years of Conservative majority government is no doubt disheartening.

 

While I'd expect to see many left-wing columnists lamenting this state of affairs, I don't think it's too much to ask that they stay grounded in reality.

 

Apparently for Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick, however, it is too much to ask.

 

Mallick has penned a piece for the UK Guardian's "Comment is Free" website.

 

Things start badly with the subheadline:

 

Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper is our version of George W Bush, minus the warmth and intellect

Now, in fairness, Mallick may not have written the headline or sub-headline. But for all the times I've heard Harper compared to Bush, that is the first time ever that anyone has claimed that Harper is dumber than Bush. I'm not even sure what that's based on, as Mallick's piece never attempts to argue that Harper lacks intelligence - in fact, it conveys the exact opposite. Very strange.

 

Mallick then proceeds to lay out a very grim scenario:

 

What happens now is the full-scale Americanisation of Canada, hinted at over the past seven years by Harper – he fired people who talked too loudly about this – but not acted upon because Canadians have always valued their distinctiveness from the angry country in decline south of the border.
It doesn't win votes to say you want to de-Canadianise Canada, long known as a bastion of free healthcare, destination of refugees and immigrants, and a place that worries about climate change. But Harper once sneeringly referred to Canada as a typical northern European "welfare state". He grew up in Calgary, Alberta, a western province that has long felt sneered at, and has spent his political career redressing the balance.

That's a pretty definitive prediction, based on very little other than Mallick's paranoia. But it's a prediction, so we'll have to see if time proves her correct. But here we see an obvious error: Mallick says Harper "grew up in Calgary", which might seem trivial, but is mentioned specifically to make her point. While Harper has obviously lived most of his adult life in Calgary, he actually "grew up" in Toronto.

 

Mallick continues:

 

Harper's Conservatives will pass an omnibus law and order bill within 100 days to make jail sentences mandatory for many offences, and begin building super-jails, copying a system that even its authors, the Americans, have begun to abandon. The huge purchase of fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, which was an election issue, will now go ahead – Harper says it will cost $9bn, government auditors say $39bn – as will massive military shipbuilding.

She makes a fair point on the law-and-order issue, and is at least somewhat in the ballpark in framing the F-35 debate, except she is misrepresenting the government's estimates and the estimates of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). As this CBC article explains, the government's estimate of purchase price plus service costs is $16-billion. The PBO's combined estimate is $29.3-billion. A significant difference to be sure, but not as dramatic as Mallick would have you believe.

 

We soon get this whopper from Mallick:

 

Corporate taxes will be cut almost immediately, Bush-style. Political financing laws will change – parties now get money for each vote – but this will end under the Conservatives, who will have a huge advantage in terms of the amount they can solicit in corporate donations.

For starters, Canada's corporate tax rates have already been cut - the Liberals and NDP had proposed to undo those cuts. Secondly, to cut them "Bush-Style" would be to not cut them at all. As noted here, the US is considering cutting its corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years.

 

Thirdly, the Conservatives cannot have an advantage when it comes to corporate donations, thanks to the Federal Accountability Act those same Conservatives introduced (emphasis added):

 

The Conservative government's Federal Accountability Act, a key campaign plank during Prime Minister Stephen Harper's campaign for the Jan. 23 election, was signed into law Tuesday.

 

(...)

 

The legislation includes new ethics regulations and oversight, and places a cap on political donations to candidates or to parties. It also bans union and corporate donations.

There's little left after that beyond more grumbling from Mallick about "grumpy old men" and how Harper hates Canada.

 

I'd suggest that Harper's majority has finally pushed Heather Mallick over the edge, but I'm guessing that happened a long time ago.

Calgary Herald Column: In Need of Secularism

My latest Calgary Herald column looks at the church-state debate unfolding in two communities in Canada - one here in Alberta and another in Quebec:

 

Surely the vast majority of Canadians would agree with the Charter affirmation of freedom of religion as one of our “fundamental freedoms”.
However, if we are to be a country in which that freedom thrives then we should be alarmed when the state grants a single religion primacy over all others.
The premise that freedom of religion is best served by the religious neutrality of the state has been confirmed on more than one occasion by the Supreme Court of Canada.
In the 1985 decision striking down the Sunday shopping ban, the court declared that “the protection of one religion and the concomitant non-protection of others imports a disparate impact destructive of the religious freedom of society.”
Three decades previous in a case involving the rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the court noted that “in our country there is no state religion … it would be distressing to think that a majority might impose its religious views upon a minority.”
Yet we can see such distressing scenarios presenting themselves both here in Alberta and thousands of kilometres away in Quebec.
In Saguenay, Quebec, Catholicism might appear to be the official state religion, except that it isn’t. Despite that fact, city council chambers features both a crucifix and a statue of the Sacred Heart. On top of that, a Christian prayer is recited prior to the start of each council meeting.
A Quebec human rights tribunal recently ordered the city to remove the religious symbols and to end the practise of prayer; a rather obvious and reasonable request.
However, the city’s Catholic mayor vows to fight the ruling, and is appealing to Canadians support his crusade. It’s easy to do – just head to Saguenay’s website and click on the image of Jesus (yes, really).
Mayor Jean Tremblay has certainly claimed the mantle of victimhood with statements like: “why is it us Christians that always have to bend?" and “I am the first mayor in the history of the world to be punished for reciting a prayer.”
That your religion is being denied special status hardly constitutes persecution and it is absurd to portray this as a free speech issue. The religious expression of individuals is completely separate from whether a specific religion is state-endorsed. Do Tremblay and his supporters understand the distinction?
Coincidentally, it is also Catholicism at the heart of another controversy here in Alberta.
Like other provinces, Alberta features a public school system and a “separate” Catholic system – both publicly funded.
In one town north of Edmonton, however, the Catholic schools are the public schools.
Morinville falls within the jurisdiction of the Greater St. Albert Catholic School Division, which is quite open with regard to its subservience to the Church.
Last month, the board flatly rejected a request for a secular public option because doing so, it said, would violate their values and policies.
According to the Alberta Catholic School Trustees Association, attending a Catholic school entails receiving “a wholly-permeated Catholic education based upon Catholic doctrine, philosophy and theology."
And they mean it. One family told me of how their young son came home from school with such questions as “Am I a good person even if I’m not Catholic?” and “Am I going to burn in Hell?”
Last week in question period, Calgary Liberal MLA Kent Hehr pressed Education Minister Dave Hancock as to why the province allows this situation to persist. Hancock agreed the situation was unacceptable, but called it an “anomaly”.
That’s no excuse for inaction. It is one thing to have state-funded schools indoctrinating kids with religion where the parents are at least willing participants. It’s quite another to have state-funded schools indoctrinating kids with religious beliefs whether the parents like it or not.
These situations in isolation might seem trivial. But once we start tolerating a state-endorsed, special privilege for a specific religion, freedom of religion is at risk. Unfortunately, those fighting to maintain the status quo in Saguenay and Morinville seem to be under the belief that they are fighting to preserve their own freedom of religion.
In reality, that freedom is best served by when the state takes no sides.

How Did Police Miss This?

It's encouraging to hear word of an independent review launched by the RCMP, but it's not yet enough to remove the sickening feeling we are all experiencing.
The Mounties have launched an independent review into how an HIV-positive, high-risk convicted rapist was given a speeding ticket and then allowed to drive away with a young girl in his vehicle.
The 10-year-old girl was abducted from the Deerfoot Mall, and her ordeal should have come to an end when an RCMP officer stopped the vehicle near Airdrie.
The girl was too terrified to say anything, and in the meantime her father was back at the mall still trying to figure out where his daughter had gone to.
So in fairness, the officer was not on the lookout for a potentially abducted child, and maybe the sight or a frightened child in the vehicle wouldn't have seemed unusual.
But the fact that no red flags were raised when the name of a convicted sex offender - one ordered to stay away from children - was entered into the police computer is shocking beyond belief.
Fortunately, the encounter spooked the suspect enough that he dropped the girl off unharmed at an Airdrie restaurant. Of course, it's not hard to imagine how a frightened and desperate sex offender might have handled that scare in a much more tragic way.
We've been given conflicting statements from RCMP about what standard procedure is when it comes to running names through the system.
An independent review may eventually give us answers, but in the meantime it also gives police an excuse to continue to avoid some very difficult questions.
Let's hope those answers are forthcoming, and let's hope this sort of thing is never allowed to happen again
More here, here, and here.