prairiechickin

Good post Army Guy, as I read this thread over the past couple of days I was thinking along your lines, but never having been there, I could not articulate my feelings. Thanks for putting this into a very real perspective, and thanks for serving.

Back during my undergrad I worked a few summers in a park. There was a bunch of old junky stuff made out of old tires and car parts, but the kids seemed to enjoy it. Then one summer we got a new manager with an expanded budget -- out went the old junky stuff and in came these contractors to build new, state-of-the-art playground equipment. I don't think the kids enjoyed it anymore than the old junky stuff, but I cringed a few years later when I learned how much cadmium and other heavy metals were discovered to be leeching from the treated lumber used in the new park equipment.

When the CCF came to power in 1944 they weree the first socilaist government in North America and they would have been considered left-wing radicals even by today's standards. In their first term in office they implemented public automobile insurance, took the first steps to create a publicly-owned electric power monopoly (Ontario already had one), and tried their hand at creating state owned manufacturing enterprises to diversify the economy. Some things worked (public insurance and the Saskatchewan Power Corporation are still flourishing), while some didn't (all the manufacturing), and this tempered the CCF for its remaining four terms in office. They got out of manufacturing, but still promoted industrial develoment via free enterprise -- the steel mill they helped build is still a going concern in Regina. They experimented quite successfully with public resource development in sodium sulfate, forestry and the fisheries, but lacked the capital and experise to devlelop oil and potash. These were left to the private sector. So while they had dreams of a socialist utopia, these were tempered by capitalist reality, and the CCF pragmatically steered a middle course between the two. They didn't stay in power for 20 years because people wanted radical change, they stayed there because they were first and foremost good managers, and with Tommy at the helm, honest to a fault. But you're right, the CCF morphed into something different when Douglas left to go national in 1962 and created the NDP. I've wondered myself where the left lost its way, since it used to enjoy such broad appeal among farmers and city folk alike. Maybe it was the victim of its own success -- once it had ameliorated the worst excesses of capitalism, there was nothing left to do and it became the enclave of utopian dreamers again. Maybe this Occupy Movement is the resurgence of that spirit, although I have a hard time picturing Tommy Douglas smoking weed in a tent in a park. He was too much of a get-it-done pragmatist to simply waste his time howling at the moon.

Well before Confederation, that is back in the days of French occupation before the Seven Year's War. I'm not sure how many of them stuck around afterwards, since by 1867 it was overwhelmingly Scottish, and still is today.

New Brunswick is officially bilingual as well, or is that the one to which you referred?

Here here!

But they weren't, were they? No, they were sent to some quiet retreat for 're-education' until the fuss died down, then they were assigned to a new unsuspecting congregation where they could re-offend over and over again.

So its all about shoddy journalism and an anti-Catholic bias, eh? Shoddy journalism in Canada, Boston, Chile, Ireland, Holland, and on and on and on. That's one big conspiracy. The poor Catholic Church, such a victim in all this.

I see your point. A simple solution would be that the couple would have to have an agreement signed by both parties as to the division of assets and respective rights to any children before they come back to Canada for their quicky divorce. No agreement, no divorce. Then they could fight it out where they live and not tie up Canadian courts with all the squabbling.

This isn't my field so I'm not going to waste my time doing thorough research for someone like you who's obviously convinced that sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is a minor affair blown out of context by the media. The very fact that Catholic priest is now synonomous with pedophile in our culture should be your first clue that something is amiss. You just go on fogging the issue, while trusting children are abused in the one place they should feel safe. Even trying to obscure this ongoing tragedy tells me a lot about where your moral compass is at.

I think your ignoring the special circumstances involved in gay mariage. I don't know why this topic has dragged on this long, it seems pretty simple to me. I think AW is absolutely right that allowing gay people to access quicky marriages in Canada is all fine and good, but imposing residenciy hardships to get a divorce is mean-spirited. If a divorce is unavailable where they live, they should be able to come back here for one in no more time than it took to get married. They pay any additional costs of the process since they don't pay taxes here, end of story.

You betcha, I do wander out to the West Coast from time to time, but haven't been for awhile. All my friends that lived out there moved back to Saskatchewan after tha last Olympics when the work dried up, but I can always find a reason to get out your way. I love Hope, one of the prettiest towns in Canada.

Times two.

I was born and raised in the city, but I had the good fortune to have immediate country roots, and my Mother couldn't wait to dump me and my little brother off on the farm every summer where we could run like coyotes and burn off a litle bit of city energy. On the farm there was a porch before you got in the house, that was the place you stripped off your muddy boots, took off your grubby coat, and if need be, used the chemical toilet bathroom. On the wall of that room was a gun rack, and it was full of specific guns for specific purposes, and the ammo was right there in case you needed it, and it was all right there in the front porch in case you had to shoot fast. Over the years I got into all kinds of shenanigans on that farm from spearing the cows into stampede, to seriously bruising the pigs playing mind games with them. I fought the turkeys, and the chickins that nearly pecked me and my brother to death when our cousins locked us in the chickin coop with snow on our boots, and the chickins came for the moisture and I thought that was the end. But in all that craziness, that gun rack was off-limits, I would have no more touched a gun on that rack than I would have taken a key and driven off with a vehicle. Guns were for grown-ups, and we understood that back then. We didn't need federal approval, there was a certain sensibility about guns and who got to play with them. That all got lost with the last blast of liberal gun control. To satisfy a significant voting population of Central Canada, that sensible gun rack is now gone in southern Saskatchewan, and with it maybe with it a good lesson for prairie kids. Some things are for adults, some things are for kids, and keep your hands off the guns until an adult teaches you. Now its been farmed out to presenters at $150/pop who know three/fifths of f-all about guns and hunting. We, the gun owners, are adding all this up, and once Harper dispenses of the registry, we'll be acting accordingly. At its best, the long-gun registry maybe accounted for half the legal guns in Canada, once the registry is wiped out we'll never know how many guns are out there.

Are you somehow suggesting that killing innocent schoolgirls and pissing on a dead enemy are even remotely on the same level? On the great list of war crimes, this one ranks pretty low on my radar. Filming it was stupid, but given the chance I'd piss on those assholes too.

Just for the hell of it, I googled Catholic Priest Scandal and got 1,190,000 hits. Yep, its all a product of the media's imagination.

You're citing Catholics and wikipedia as proof that the entire Catholic scandal is a product of the media? Well, I'm convinced.

This seems a bit harsh. Did a marine recently break your heart or something?

I have no hard data at my fingertips here, but I suspect your source is doing some pretty selective culling of stats and outright denial. I'm just trying to think of all the scandals involving pedophiles in the past ten years or so, and by far the bulk of them involved Catholic priests, which is why I posted what I did earlier. To say other religeons have just as many cases beggers belief. Yes, the Anglicans were/are forced to the edge of bancruptcy over scandals in residential schools, both sexual and physical. And yes, Warren Jeffs and his band of merry miscreants were fond of child brides in a splinter Mormon sect. And even Boy Scouts of America have been tarnished with this brush recently, so we know it happens in a multitude of organizations. But scandals in Antigonish, Newfoundland, Boston, Ireland and France --and that's just off the top of my head -- all involved Catholic priests to the point that I'm wondering if its not just a few bad apples, but rather systemic to the religeon.

Good point.

I do, and they do. I'm purebred, cowboys on my Father's side, dirt farmers on my Mother's.

Careful there, redneck love is a dangerous thing when unleashed.

I can see that this video doesn't help the western cause, but at the same time radical Muslims will kill over a cartoon, so I don't lose much sleep over what pisses them off.

Seems like a reasonable compromise.