New Media

The financial market just had it’s worst day since 9/11, just in time to smack everyone who topped up their retirement savings plan for tax season.

I know the market fundamentals look okay. And I know that investing for the long term, I can expect my capital to grow in spite of temporary setbacks.

But the timing on this one is awful.

The worst of it is (at least for Canadian investors) that our country, and in particular my region of the country, is doing pretty well, buoyed by high commodity prices. We may be hewers of wood and drawers of water – and drillers of oil – but right now that’s not such a terrible gig.

The mantra to diversify is backfiring big this time. We put some of our hard-won coin into foreign markets, only to see it squandered as economically retarded powerhouses, the USA and China, bring everyone down with them.

Alberta is spending $396 million into oil sands production hub Fort McMurray to relieve social ills caused by the breakneck pace of development.

That’s just poor strategic planning. Alberta is already debt free and making money hand over fist from its energy sector. It’s citizens have some of the highest wages and lowest tax regime in the country.

But the goose that laid the golden egg is also the source of huge environmental damage. The amount of water waste alone that is necessary to extract oil from the oil sands is already in the process of turning Alberta into a desert. Very soon, Alberta could have a lot more in common with Saudi Arabia than just it’s main export product.

If anything, development needs to slow down, not triple (as the oil companies have planned).

But slowing it down requires no government intervention of the kind that turned Liberal into a dirty word in the oil patch. All government needs to do is lay off and let market factors determine production. If the market can’t sustain itself at its current levels, then it will have to slow down – or at least force the oil companies to pony up for social services and environmental protections, instead of forcing taxpayers to cover their unsustainable practices.

Another righteous rant against Islamophobia blots the pages of Vancouver’s Georgia Straight.

“Islamophobia is the way in which the Muslim community is constructed as an enemy, a civilizational other,” Itrath Syed, an SFU women’s studies sessional instructor is quoted in the piece. “[It's] the idea that Muslims as a whole are completely homogenous unto themselves, there is no differentiation between Muslims. As a whole, Muslims occupy the opposite of everything that is good in the West.”

The article goes on to condemn Canadian legislation and policy targeting terrorism, which is seen as a weapon to persecute Muslims. Columnist Carlito Pablo and his source’s concern about racist fearmongering is undoubtedly as sincere as it is misplaced.

Canada’s terror legislation didn’t appear out of a vacuum. Muslims as a group are indeed more feared and suspect than other Western minority groups – but this is not owing to some anti-Muslim conspiracy.

Of the countless terror attacks on Western cities, aircraft and favored tourist destinations in the past four decades, it is almost invariably Muslim extremists such as Al Queda responsible.

That this puts a harsh burden of suspicion on perfectly innocent Muslims in our multicultural nation is awful. But to pretend that this fear and suspicion has no legitimate basis, and that the resulting public policy lacks any sense of scale or justice, is perverse.

Canada needs to outlaw the Parti Quebecois.

Yes, that would be bad for political freedom in Quebec and Canada. But the status quo is an even worse infringement on political freedom in that province.

Instead of arguing over health care, housing or the environment – issues that matter to Canadians from coast to coast – Quebecers are invariably forced in provincial elections to vote on the issue of whether they want to stay in the country. It’s going to happen again on March 26.

It’s not that Quebecers don’t get to discuss the issues, but that all of them are ultimately subordinated to national unity/breakup when election time comes around. As such, one never really knows whether their elected officials got reelected (or booted) over financial management or social priorities, or if it was because of their efforts to keep the province in the federation (or vise versa). This is bad for democracy.

Canadian unity politicians who haven’t done anything to change this situation know this, and they must also know that it’s a huge gamble to keep doing nothing. The Liberals may very well with this election, or the next one… but what about the one after, or the one after that? Quebec sovereignty has been an issue for over three centuries, and a serious threat to Canada for over three decades. It’s not going to go away.

Iranian refugee Amir Kazemian gets to stay in Canada on on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. What took so long?

This should have been a no-brainer. A man arrives in Canada from a country where they torture people who are even distantly suspected of disloyalty against the religious thugocracy. He claims, not all that surprisingly, that he has been a victim of such medieval treatment. We accept his mother as a political refugee, but we tell him that he has to go back…

So he holes up in a church in Vancouver. In a sequence of events taken from an as-yet unwritten dark comedy, he finds himself arrested… after three years of fruitless waiting. On the eve of his deportation, Canadian officials tell him he can stay. Clearly, he can’t have been a security threat, since they were able to make a final decision on his status virtually on the spot when finally forced to.

Three years is a long time to spend in limbo.