Wilber

As Neil said "one small step". It's a start. If the electorate picks one person and the PM appoints another, he'll have some splaynin to do. Gordon Campbell came out in favour although he said that if he had his druthers, he'd just get rid of it.

I agree but the bottom line is the value of your currency signifies what you are worth to the rest of the world, the lower the value the less you are worth.

No law is worth the paper it is written on if you don't have the ability or will to enforce it. Most of all, international law.

He gave Dubya 1 billion?

I didn't know we grew coffee in Canada. I don't much care what Americans have to pay for a log. I do care whether the money I make will allow me to buy a log. Perhaps they are full of shoppers because that is the only place they can afford to shop. Most Canadian companies that manufacture, use products made from commodities priced in US dollars, products, components and using machinery made outside the country. A lower Canadian dollar increases their cost of production in Canadian dollars. It may make their product cheaper for a foreigner but anyone buying it in Canadian dollars will pay more. Our healthcare system uses large amounts of very expensive products and machinery most of which is made outside Canada and much of that in the US. A lower Canadian dollar increases the cost of providing healthcare and any other services that depend on foreign products. A lower Canadian dollar affects every part of our lives, not just our ability to export. Riverwind makes a good point about a rapid rise in the Canadian dollar making it difficult for our producers to adapt in the short term but in the long term, a low dollar is not in the country's best interest. It lowers our standard of living and makes our companies less efficient and less competitive. Either you are competitive or not and intentionally lowering the country's standard of living to facilitate an export industry is the start of a road to being a third world country, whose citizens spend their days making goods for foreigners that they will never be able to own themselves.

If a 75 cent dollar is better than a 88 cent dollar then a 50 cent dollar must be better still. If not, when does a lower Canadian dollar become bad. The Canadian dollar has appreciated quickly against the US but not so much against other currencies. That hurts us because our biggest market is the US. Our commodities are priced in US dollars. Our exports are valued in US dollars. If our dollar goes down we pay more for our own stuff. Not only because the market for those products is in US dollars but because the materials that went into them were priced in US dollars. We pay more for anything we import. We pay more for that salad on the dinner table that is made from California or Florida produce. If the Canadian dollar goes down against other currencies we pay more for that Japanese, German or Korean car, camera or electronics. Even North American branded vehicles or other products that are made outside of the US or Canada, not to mention all that stuff you buy that is made in China because the Yuan is pegged to the US dollar. The fact is, as the value of the Canadian dollar goes down, so does the standard of living for anyone whose income is in Canadian dollars.

This is the former constituency of David Anderson, environment minister in the Chretien cabinet and big booster of Kyoto.

No, you make stuff that is better than anyone else so people will pay top dollar for it like the Japanese and Germans.

How would you do that, pray tell? and at whose expense? "Here dollar-dollar-dollar! Here dollar-dollar-dollar!" Excellent! Why would we want to DIScourage our buyers by ENcouraging a high dollar? As Riverwind said, when our dollar is low more people buy more of our stuff. This is a good thing. What's the point of selling your stuff if you sell it for nothing?

To start with, I don't own a shotgun. I do own a rifle but it is not kept loaded and handy so I can shoot the first person who walks through the door. The rifle, its bolt and ammunition are all stored in different parts of the house. I am much more concerned about my grandkids when they are over than I am about a home invasion. If this guy was worried about a home invasion, my guess is he had good reason to be and not by the police. If the guy could get his shotgun, load it and run to the bathroom before the police got in, he is at least guilty of unsafe storage of a firearm. You talk about endangering other people in the house, what do you call leaving a loaded shotgun lying around?

Be reasonable. That is not what I said. I would sit in a parked cruiser in front of his drive-way -- like they do in the movies. By the way, what would YOU do? Is ridiculously kamikaze brutal self-sacrificial force the only thing you can choose? Try to be creative -- at least for the sake of your children who do not need to be orphaned over a stupid drug-bust. Perhaps you watch too many movies. I'm not saying there were no mistakes made or that it couldn't have been handled better. I don't know. The fact is, part of a police officers job description is dealing with bad people who are often well armed. They are far better qualified to manage the risks they take than you or I. No doubt procedures will be reviewed and perhaps there will be some changes. Perhaps not. The police departments in our country serve hundreds if not thousands of warrants every day without incident but once and a while things don't go according to plan and someone gets hurt. I'm not going to prejudge this incident because I don't know enough about it and neither do you, so perhaps you shouldn't either.

You would evacuate everyone who lived on that block until he was starved out?

Actually the UK itself has a better system. Party discipline is not enforced nearly as strictly as in Canada, the MP's don't stand for it. It is not the system so much as what we have done with it.

Last year a judge in Mission BC dismissed a case because he said the RCMP did not give a resident enough time to respond before forcing a door when exercising a warrant on a grow op. According to this judge the Charter says the police must give enough time for a resident to arm himself before forcing a door. This is in a society where the crooks are often better armed than the police. The other day my kid went to a residence to follow up on a case where a guy had been stopped for a traffic violation and a pistol grip shotgun was found in his car. Among other restricted weapons they found an AR15 with a laser sight and the serial numbers filed off. The Winnipeg incident was also a drug warrant being served on a member of a gang associated with the Hells Angels. What would you learn from it if you were a cop? To go home if the guy didn't answer the door bell?

Someone who puts a minorities rights above a majorities rights. That's what I learned from this forum on this last week. That's what it truly means to be a Canadian. Why would you be proud of putting one group's rights above another? Rights are rights, what does being in a majority or minority have to do with it?

Guns are not the crime, they are a tool used by criminals. More lethal than most, but just a tool. The drug trade would not cease if all of a sudden there were no hand guns or other restricted weapons. There is so much money involved that the people fighting over it would just find other ways of getting rid of each other.

That's true and between elections US legislators vote as they see fit, not according to party discipline. That is more democratic.

So why do we need legislated multiculturalism? I don't know what we would wind up with. It wouldn't be anything we have now but it would be uniquely Canadian, not a dogs breakfast of cultures brought from other places. Do you think any of the cultures that make up our country always knew what they were going to be? Why would we be a bunch of boring narrow minded red necks living near the north pole? Why couldn't we be better than the sum of our parts? Are we afraid to be unique as Canadians? Why do we need to be something else?

Someone who puts a minorities rights above a majorities rights. That's what I learned from this forum on this last week. That's what it truly means to be a Canadian. How does that make us different from other free societies. What makes Canadians different from everyone else?

I wonder if that would have been so if there had been no 9/11. The US was attacked and everyone jumped on the wrong bandwagon and most are now trying to get off. It was a situation ripe for abuse and I wonder if it would have been much different if it happened here.

Exactly, among many other cultures. So what is a Canadian culture? An immigrant arrives from Japan. We tell him he doesn't have to change anything to be a Canadian. An immigrant arrives from Italy. We tell him he doesn't have to change anything to be a Canadian. An immigrant arrives from Nicaragua. We tell him he doesn't have to change anything to be a Canadian, etc., etc., etc., The obvious question is, what the hell is a Canadian?

This is a product of their fund raising rules, not their form of government. Their representatives are more responsive to their electorate because the President has no power over them. They cannot be thrown out of caucus or not have their nomination papers signed because they didn't vote the way the big guy wanted them to. Wonder why there are so many lobbyists in Ottawa if they have no effect on government.

None of these evolved in isolation, they are a result of many cultures assimilating over centuries of migrations and conquests. They will evolve and spawn new cultures regardless of whatever politicians and special interests try to engineer through legislation. We criticize religious fundamentalists when they try to turn the clock back. The concept of multiculturalism tries to stop the clock. Equally as bizarre.

Assimilation is a two way street. Cultures cannot assimilate without assuming many of the characteristics of both cultures, hopefully the best ones. The great majority of the worlds cultures came about exactly that way. Very few evolved in isolation. Most of these cultures would not exist or be very different if legislated multiculturalism had been enforced over the ages. Legislated multiculturalism as much as says, "we aren't going to do that anymore, we are going to take a snapshot of the worlds cultures and evolve them separately." Rather than calling it "multiculturalism", "cultural Balkanism" would be a better term. Legislated "multiculturalism" is not the natural way of things because it requires laws to exist and as a result is bound to fail.

Before "multicultualism" there were ancient Britons, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans and others who over time merged into the culture we call British. The same goes for France and the rest of Europe in one way or another. Wonder what they would have turned into if they had made it policy to keep different cultures as individual as possible. Wonder how North America would have developed. There would certainly be no French /English question, there would be no such thing as French and English.