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James Bissett was once head of Immigration Canada. In today's Post he gives a pretty clear view on how to fix the asylum mess. Namely, get rid of the damn lawyers and the appointed refugee boards and turn the job over to professionals like other countries do. We provide a far greater access to our legal system than other countries, including paid legal advise, than the UN charter requires. We've also hugely expanded our definition of 'refugee', well beyond the UN definition. It is not necessary to have a quasi-judicial body such as the Immigration Refugee Board adjudicate refugee claims. These decisions should not be delegated to a board of politically appointed members responsible only to themselves, and who may, or may not, have the experience, training, or knowledge to render quality decisions about who is or is not a refugee. Furthermore, because it allows unlimited access to its deliberations, it has suffered with backlog problems from its inception and the current crisis is just another example. In most countries asylum decisions are made by professional refugee officers or judges. They have the background and expertise necessary to make quality decisions quickly. They can be located in various parts of the country thus improving and speeding up the asylum process. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/how-canada-can-actually-fix-the-migration-mess-on-its-borders

God is like politics. Whatever god we imagine is the one we deserve.

To start with you need to look at the word "God". "Gad" was used to refer to Babylonian Syrians or Canaanites as a deity that brought bgood luck and fortune. It was also used to refer to the planet identified Jupiter, and the deity of the Skies and the Sun. If you go to the oldest Indo-Germanic dictionaries " ghodh " referred to a union, i.e., sexual union or mating. In fact it was also used by pagans and the Teutonic language and cultures to refer to any superhuman being good or evil, and idols. "Ghut" means " that which can be invoked". In fact Christians began using the word "God" when King Constantine ordered men up into the mountains to take the Gnostic Christian traditions that were oral in Roman society and the pagan ones and merge them into one written book of laws to prevent a civil war. This is why the pagan Sin Diety Gott and the Gnostic Christian concept of a divine rigin or Yaweh became known as "God" just as references to Jesus as a human born to save the world through his good deeds and show us all we are humans sent from a divine source to heal the world through good deeds became merged with the Pagan concept of a deity, i.e., a superhuman common in many pagan tales. In fact the origin of the word "God" has nothing to do with what we think it means but as a reference to a superhuman or an idol. All versions of the Bible were "inspired by" God or "according to" what someone long after Jesus would have been dead, repeats second, third, fourth hand. As well even in most references to "Adonai" or "Yaweh" its only a specific person who has conversations with this entity and even Moses was told he could not look directly at this entity or he would burn his eyes out. There are no references to "God" showing itself to Jesus or Muhammed in a human form. In most religions including the three one God religions, God is in fact an abstract concept of where everything that contains life was supposed to have riginated. It is a source where creation flows from. If anything its a term for free flowing energy found in all forms of life and which changes to adapt to the environment the energy finds itself in. What we also know is there are numerous versions of the Bible both new and Old Testament and every human who reads the Bible who feels they understand it, think they can go out and explain it to others. What we also know is because of the way the Bible was written it is ambiguous and lends itself to numerous interpretations of each and every sentence. What we also know is when written it contained biases to because of contexts in which its original writers intended to resolve conflicts in the time it was written. However we do not know the names of the original writers and what conflicts of their day or values of their day they would have been influenced by. Clearly someone without scientific knowledge of certain diseases, weather conditions, axioms of biology, physics, chemistry and other sciences, would write differently then someone versed in all of them. Things that may have appeared as miracles for those writers today would be explained probably by scientific explanations. For example Moses spreading blood in the Niles could be explained in an alternative story as his being aware red tide algae was spreading. The plague of locust could simply be explained as Moses sending someone out in the desert to see a cloud of locust coming before the Pharoah would have. Walking across parted seas could have simply been Moses knowing when to order his people across a body of water at low tide or that was very shallow either of which the Egyptians would not have known. Miracles of Jesus can now be explained by science and the possibility he went to India and learned medicine when medicine was developed in India but not yet developed in the Middle East. Jesus clearing the face of lepers could be explained by his understanding you had to cleanse infected skin and exposing infected skin to the sun was good in that it would kill off certain surface bacteria and dry out infected flesh full of fluid. Jesus allegedly being a fisherman would have known about red tide algae and how shell fish could be poisonous and how fish must be eaten immediately and that would seem like a miracle if he knew this and others did not and would eat things and get poisoned. Did he walk on water or simply was walking on rocks just under the water. On and on it goes. Anything any human writes is necessarily subjective to their biases. When a human tells me he speaks to God, what I hear is he believes he speaks to God. I do not doubt people think they know God, can read the Bible and preach God by explaining what they think it means. Me I look at the Bible no differently then I do Aseop's fables or the tales of Isaac Boleshvyk Singer or stories from the Tao writers or parables from the Bhudda. I believe things are written to help us explain basic concepts. I believe they are written as analogies and what the original analogy was meant to show and what we think it shows may not be the same. I do know in Judaism the sentences of the Bible are said to contain numerous meanings not just the surface or litera one and the Talmud was a set f rules created to help debate or argue the never ending possible meanings each sentence had. The idea in Judaism is that a sentence or meaning must constantly be challenged and questioned and updated to match the circumstances of the present tense and bring the meaning to the present from its past context. Laws and rules are defined as forever fluid and changing. In Christianity and Islam there is more likelihood to giving one and only one fixed meaning to each passage. This is strange because Jesus would have spoken and written either Armaic or Hebrew both languages where one word could mean many things depending on its context of use not the word itself. As well Judaism inherited the belief of God being an energy source that gave forth a never ending stream of energy that constantly changes in shape to adapt to the situation it is in. In this concept which comes from the same ancestors as the Hindus, and is similar to Bhuddist and Taoist teachings, if there was an original energy source, it would be everything there was, is or could be and so nothing but everything at the same time a paradox a human mind can not fathom. Humans are said to be a spark of it, or a minute particle of it. It is said this energy created a being to share.and taught that being everything. That beingt hen said, you taught me everything but how to create. So the original being said, if I give you the ability to create, you can never be part of me again. That second being said no problem. So that second being created, then that second being created a third and so on. Each vessel of knowledge goes on to fill up another in a never ending series of sharing creation but that detaches each creator foever as to interfere with its creation would destroy its abilty to create and understand creation. The other story is the thing of things being everything and nothing ejected thousands of pieces of itself in biillions of directions in a big bang so as to never be alone or singular again while still being singular. Call it an act of explosion caused by loneliness or an act of ultimate sharing of its perfection. In any event these types of explanations are not capable of being grasped so God is simply seen as an abstract source for creative energy that flows infinitely creating never ending dimensions of where energy vibrates at different levels to express different meanings by balancing its positive and negative clashes which are the source of its fuel that keep it flowing. The Kabbalah like the ancient Hindu ancestors and Easter disciplinaries sees energy as infinite and ever changing and hwen you try block it, it eventually finds its way to where it has to go despite that block. We are seen as a flow of water in a river. The more free flowing we are the more we create good or positive things and the slower and more stagnant we get, the more evil and negative things we create. Rivers eventually slow down into many curves from a straight line and dry up like our human bodies do. The water is evaporated. However what we know about the water is when it evaporates it goes into clouds where it is expelled as rain to form new rivers. Thus the secret of never ending life or never ending mutation of energy into a new form to express itself. We are said to have chosen to be created so we can learn. The only way we are said to be able to learn is if we are not perfect but imperfect. By expiencing imperfection, i.e., the competing opposites of negative and positive, that clash creates lessons on how to balance the two which then gives us our meaning. So in this sense God has nothing to do with it. We are each our own God given the gift to create ourselves to search for meaning by constantly trying to balance or clashing opposites. Blaming a God is pointless as it is us as an individual who has and will decide ultimately or path and destiny. The God we think of does not interefere for to do that would wipe you out. It instead watches feeling every good and bad thing we feel from a distance, connected in pain and joy but never deliberately in any way that stops us from creating or feeling either. So this means things like the Bible may be a code some use and derive strength from which is good for them or it could be used as a crutch and weapon by others who look for excuses to be evil and hate others. To me a Bible is a possible weapon or healing agent depending on who uses it and the individual choices they ultimately make. Me personally I find the most important and difficult concepts to grasp the ones that seem the most simple.Take for example the basic lesson by doing good we heal the world and help it. No one can see the miracle or size of the good deed's result since its ripple effect is beyond our immediate vision. So they underestimate their capacity to heal and help others. However when we do something bad, we usually can see some immediate horrible effect. So we tend to get stuck up on and over emphasize our ability to do bad things and forget we have equal ability to do good things. I find a lot of people use the Bible to focus on the bad things as it is easy and use it to tell us how evil we are and how God will punish us. I believe that lecture is incomplete and wrongfully explained until it spends equal time explaining what good we do and likewise in reverse. We are not superhuman. We are imperfect but we can create miracles by learning to balance our negative energy or contain it and expressing our positive side. We can never extinguish our negative side, it is us, but it can be balanced and contained not by hiding from it, but by learning not to fear it by welcoming the negative with positive energy,

Yep. They're desperate to be relevant. They're sick of sitting at the kiddy table. They want a seat with the big boys so that they can scream their platitudes with a megaphone instead of squeaking like mice. Unfortunately for the Greens they have the weakest, most insipid leader in the history of politics, right at the time when their age-old agenda is suddenly one of the hottest topics in politics. There are literally millions of people who care more about the environment than they care about the economy but the Greens can't cash in on it because E May is so grossly unfit for leadership. It's like it's raining dollar bills but they don't want a butterfly net, they're happy to use their dessert fork.

I’m at the Trump tower in NYC! Beers are cheaper here than outside. Interesting. Trumponomics in action.

Weird how you rail against this - although men are not jailed, beaten or killed for non-conformity - yet hijabs and burqas are symbols of women's empowerment and right to choose. Honestly, the mind games and thought twisting you guys go through to excuse what Islam does is absolutely bizarre.

I concur with many experts and studies (such as the one I linked in a recent comment above) who agree that: I'm aware that you disagree and that you believe Islam - the religion - bears no responsibility for how its followers behave. I'm not the only one who disagrees with you, so don't make out like I'm a racist and Islamophobe for finding many of the teachings of Islam dangerous and harmful.

If you care for the Green movement at all then I'd skip voting for them while May is their leader. They'll be way better off once they ditched her. Re: Trudeau, his anti-democracy ways are front and center. 1) He openly admires China's government's ability to just plow ahead and do whatever they want. 2) He openly stated that the policy of his Liberal Party is that Liberal MPs are not allowed to vote in a manner that represents the will of their constituents - they have to vote the way they are told to vote. If they feel like they need to vote against abortion then they aren't allowed in. His scandals aren't small, or maybe just conspiracy theories like Russian collusion or storm-mongering in the US, or "who paid back the $90K". They're huge and blatant. He was caught red-handed trying to use influence that's well outside of his authority as PM in order to protect a company that's been caught bribing other politicians ($2M for a single bridge contract. How much would they bribe someone for ten year's worth of bidding on federal contracts? Trudeau put $150B worth of infrastructure spending on the table. What's a chunk of that worth to SNC?) When he was caught he tried to bully and intimidate Raybould, even kicked her out of the caucus. She's still not allowed to speak. Were any witnesses against Trump or Harper forbidden to speak? And that's just one of his 5 ethics breaches. He's been found guilty twice. He gave the CBC $795M right after the 2015 election, and CBC gave him 3 years worth of Harper-bashing before the election to earn it. Now he's spending $600,000,000.00 more of our tax dollars to buy off more media for the next election. If Trump gave $1.4B to Fox the CBC would go apoplectic, and so would you. You know that what Trudeau did was a scandal, you just don't want to admit it and the media certainly isn't going to complain..