New Media

The consensus amongst a crowd of fireworks watchers from the roof of my building last night is that the USA kicked Canada’s butt in the Vancouver Celebration of Light fireworks competition. This, despite a lack of wind that prevented the Yanks’ fireworks smoke from moving out of the way and made half the show sort of an exploding purple nebula.

What was up with the Canadian theme, anyway? Attack? Godzilla? I don’t get it.

Will the Chinese give us a fireworks show to make the Americans (and us) run for cover? More to come.

A friend also noted that last year during the Vancouver City garbage strike, everyone pitched in after the fireworks to keep the beaches clean. Then, the sanitation workers were hoping the beaches would turn into landfill sites so as to boost their strike power. This year, with the strike a fruit-fly tinged memory, the garbage is piling up for the city crew to deal with. Seems like Vancouverites can’t help sticking it to the city workers.

Either a full 60 per cent of Canadians really do hate brown people, or the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress owes Canada’s Prime Minister an immediate apology (Read Who’s Really Playing Politics With Omar Khadr, Mr. Elmasry?).

An Ipsos Reid poll result released today shows that a video released by supporters of the alleged grenade tossing son of Al Queda, Omar Khadr, has done nothing to change Canadians minds about his detention in Gitmo (National Post). NP stringer James Cowan writes:

The results also demonstrate public support for Stephen Harper’s decision not to intervene in the case. Overall, 60% of people said they believe Mr. Khadr should remain in U. S. custody, while 40% said he should be immediately returned to Canada. “The Prime Minister has echoed the sentiments of the country,” Mr. Wright said. “His position on this is pretty sound and opinion is pretty firm.”

That actually puts me in a minority, since I stated in my last post that Khadr ought to be sent to Canada to face trial. Can’t say I’m all that disappointed in the majority of Canadians who likely made the calculation that Omar Khadr, his family and their supporters may represent a dire security threat to the nation — and that should outweigh any other considerations.

Perhaps the majority is right after all about the downside of repatriating Khadr to Canada. I’m still not convinced. But I’m open to arguments.

Canadian Islamic Congress president Mohamed Elmasry says Prime Minister Stephen Harper couldn’t possibly have any reason to avoid speeding Canada’s Al Queda family’s celebrity son home in time for Ramadan other than pure filthy racism (Canadian Press: Harper ‘playing politics’ with Khadr because he’s brown-skinned: Muslim leader).

From Elmasry’s odd perspective, any other Canadian who agrees with the Prime Minister’s stand is automatically a racist. That Omar Khadr is alleged to have killed an American soldier on a foreign battlefield where Canadian forces could just as easily have been the victims couldn’t possibly be a factor. The fact that Canada may not even have the legal apparatus to deal with Khadr any more effectively than the Americans… also not a factor. That Khadr is the son of a woman who proudly declares, “We are an Al Queda family“… also, not relevant.

Not relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant. Anyone who disagrees hates brown people. Especially the Prime Minister.

Why Canadian Muslims don’t petition to have this slanderous demagogue removed from his position may in fact say more about Canadian Muslims than it does about Elmasry, sad to say.

Funny thing is, I actually agree with Elmasry on his side objective: bring Khadr home (His main objective being tarring Canadians with the sticky tar of racism so as to prevent them from speaking out against a creeping shift in this country’s values). I’ll let the erudite and Agreeable Lyle Neff take over from here with some solid reasoning on the Pith and Substance blog. Mr. Neff writes from Vancouver:

Ms T., although I grudgingly agree that Awful Omar Khadr should be pulled from Gitmo and put into Ontario clink for some less-hard years (because he was just a kid at the dawn of the war; because he may not have killed; because of his father’s malignancy), Canadian public opinion is quite right to hold the boy and his clan in contempt, as one does traitors.

Hey, remember when Jean Chretien interceded with Pakistan to get Omar’s murderous zealot dad sprung — ‘96, wasn’t it? No apology from the Grits as of yet…

I expect we’ll be waiting for that apology for some time, Neff. And now Paul Martin seems to have found his own 10-foot pole (Globe and Mail).

When even the Europeans think we’ve gone too far, it may be time to rethink Vancouver’s harm reduction approach in the downtown eastside. In this week’s Globe and Mail, in “Europe’s approach to drugs is more enlightened … it’s tougher”:

Advocates of harm-reduction measures, such as needle exchanges, methadone programs and Vancouver’s supervised-injection site, often point to Europe’s more enlightened approach to drugs as proof of how far behind we are in Canada. But parts of Europe are having second thoughts. Socially progressive Sweden had a brief but disastrous fling with prescription heroin back in the 1960s. After that, it embraced the hard-line approach. Today its policy is to make drugs very difficult to get, but treatment very easy – and sometimes compulsory…

Meanwhile, in another part of Europe:

Two months ago, the Scottish government announced a change in direction. From now on its primary focus will be on “recovery,” not just harm reduction. “Harm reduction ideas have failed in Scotland,” says Prof. McKeganey. “They have failed to protect injectors from hepatitis C, failed to reduce the scale of the drug problem, failed to reduce many of the harms inflicted on others.”

Hmmm. Sounds familiar. So much for the ambitious ideals of Project Civil City.

Here’s an organization that just doesn’t seem to be listening to the growing consumer demand for environmental sustainability, much less the economic laws of supply and demand. The Telus White Pages came out in Vancouver this week. Quite predictably, most copies seem to have gone straight to the recycling bin (Metro). Seems there’s this newfangled World Wide Interweb that most folks are using to get the directory information they need (Close to 70 per cent of Canadians were, as of March 2007, anyway — Internet World Stats).

The White Pages are printed on recycled paper, from what I understand. That’s great. But the amount of energy and recycled resources that might have been used to make something that someone would actually want (I don’t know… school textbooks? Consumer magazines? Porn?) seems to qualify this annual event as a bad move from an ecological perspective.

In at least one BC community, these products seem to literally go straight from the publishers to the recycling depot (thanks, James Glave).

As in my previous call to action (The Yellow Pages Must Be Stopped), I’m calling for an opt-in requirement for anyone who still wants these bulky directories brought to their door. Put the onus on the publishers to actually contact the end users (by email or a single-page mail-out) to get people to sign up to receive the books.

Again, that’s opt-in, not opt-out. Most email and print newsletters use this kind of procedure and it seems to work well. Those who don’t want the stuff don’t get it, and the publishers don’t have to waste money, resources and energy producing products that go straight into a blue box.