Hugo

I don't know what you think the courts are acting in accordance with, but it isn't the Charter. Let me give you an example. Prior to 1999, same-sex unions were not recognised in law, at all. The Supreme Court could, as you suggested that they do, have struck down the marriage law as a violation of the Charter and demanded that Parliament draw up a more inclusive one, but they did not. Then, in 1999, the Supreme Court changed their minds and changed the law (which, according to you, they can't do) to include common-law same-sex marriages. Did the Charter change? No. Did the nature of marriage change, either heterosexual or homosexual? No. But the Court felt the need to change a law that, up until 1999, they had not had a problem with. Then in 2003, a bill was announced to allow same-sex marriage across the board. The Supreme Court was consulted beforehand to find any objections, and surprise surprise, they had none. While this won't be finalised until next year, I will bet you a year's salary that if the bill passes the Supreme Court will not oppose it. Not to mention the fact that courts in Ontario and BC had already made full-fledged same-sex marriage legal. So, three different laws. At one point, the Supreme Court found them all to be in accordance with the Charter and Canadian law in general. The truth is that the courts do not follow the Charter, they follow the political tide of the day, another tendency you claim they don't have. So, you believe that federal and provincial governments have never and never will make a law that affects the business world? I hate to break it to you, but there are labour laws in Canada, including laws on nondiscriminatory hiring, so yes, the Charter does have something to say about what a businessman does. So governments have never and will never make any laws concerning property ownership? Laughable. Trudeau originally wanted to include property rights in the Charter, which doesn't make sense if, as you claim, property rights are no concern of the Charter. I also feel that the duration of governments, how often Parliament shall sit etc. are less fundamental rights and freedoms than the right to own and enjoy property, and yet these former "rights" are contained within the Charter and the latter is not. The Supreme Court doesn't agree today with what they were doing last year, and then they didn't agree with what they were doing three years before that. If I may paraphrase that: the law and the protection of the law may not discriminate based on race etc. However, the law may discriminate based on race etc. to ameliorate a disadvantage. Sounds like self-contradiction to me. After all, if you pass legislation to favour one group (say, women) to "ameliorate disadvantage" you are automatically disadvantaging another group (in this case, men), so subsection 2 contradicts subsection 1.

Deaths from cancer in 1997: 58,703 Deaths from heart disease in 1997: 57,417 From Statistics Canada. Looks like a crisis situation to me, when the two leading causes of death in Canada put together are only slightly more than the number of annual deaths from abortion.

Craig, the Bible is not really a historical-romantic work. It is a spiritual work. It is not intended to give definitive answers to anything at all, but it was written by men under divine inspiration and the proper purpose of the Bible is to help you to achieve similar divine inspiration. Whether or not the Bible is inaccurate or self-contradictory (and it often is) is not terribly relevant to that, but if it awakens a sense of the divine in you, it has fulfilled its purpose. Stories like Genesis or the Ark are not there as historical accounts. They may be true, they may be greatly exaggerated, or they may be wholly fictituous. The point of stories like this is not to tell you what happened in history, the point is to bring home to you the omnipotence of God. Similarly, the crucifixion may be true, partially true, or false, but regardless, the point of that story is to show you the compassion and love that God has for Man. In that regard, the Bible bears a resemblance to Aesop's Fables in that they are a collection of stories that may or may not be based upon any particular real events, but their intended prupose is to illustrate a point.

Para 15, subsection 1 of the Charter states that nobody shall discriminate based on ethnicity, sex etc. Subsection 2 then states that an exemption shall be made for programmes designed to "ameliorate the conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups" including those disadvantaged by ethnicity, sex etc. So racism is wrong, unless it's reverse racism. It protects Affirmative Action, basically, which as we discussed some time ago is itself a racist/sexist/ageist/whatever-ist idea that prolongs age-old prejudices, worsens the problems it seeks to solve and deepens bigotry. As for the private property, note that nowhere in the Charter does it state that any individual or group has the right to own property. It's not insignificant, after all, it does stipulate how often Parliament shall sit and so forth and that would seem to be a more frivolous "right" than the right to own property. I gather that Trudeau originally wanted to include this right, but the socialist NDP would not have supported the Charter if it had.

Morgan, good points. It does not matter what the judges are doing as much as how they are being allowed to do it, and a panel of judges accountable to nobody and appointed by one man who is himself not elected to his post by the people should not be allowed a big say in the laws of our country - but they are. That is not democracy. I disagree. If they were, they would have already struck down the Charter, it's protection of institutionalised racism, sexism and other discriminations and refusal to recognise private property rights. All the courts seem to be doing is to be protecting special interest groups and the whim of the PM, and if that is even being allowed to happen, something is wrong. If they are protecting the people and their wishes, why didn't they strike down the 1969 abortion amendment, when the majority of Canadians were pro-life? The example I gave was of a law being stricken down. No, it does not. The Charter protects the right of an employer to refuse to hire me because I am a white male. The Charter protects the right of a university to refuse me admission because I am Christian. The Charter does not acknowledge that I have the right to own property. It was intended to, but thanks to the NDP, it didn't. Damn right, the content bothers me - and the process. I'm amazed that a free country like Canada has an egregious document like the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in its constitution. I'm of the opinion that only a law granting what the court itself granted by default (i.e. abortion-on-demand) would have been acceptable, and any new law that was not would likewise have been stricken. Let's face it, the wording of the 1969 amendment made it pretty easy to get an abortion anyway.

But you admit they do the striking down, and Parliament is not necessarily required to do anything about it. This is not right. Parliament speaks for the people, and the courts do not. You gave an example of Parliament abusing power, but I gave you an example of a court abusing power, so that changes nothing. If Parliament decides to pass something into law, the proper role of the court is to apply that. It may not change it, ignore it or strike it down. As I said, even the Charter is a Parliamentary Act, and if we accept that a court can strike down any Act, we have nothing but the word of judges that they will even uphold the Charter. Basically, I do not feel that a panel of non-elected judges should be able to over-ride Parliamentary acts. That is not democracy. You insist that courts will uphold the Charter against infringements by Parliament, however, you cannot tell me why they are bound to do so. That's because they are not. They could strike the Charter down tomorrow. Unlikely, but the way things are, perfectly possible. The reason is irrelevant in this discussion, the fact that they can is not. Even if they were bound to uphold the Charter, why should that be their duty? Why is the proper role of a court to defend Acts of Parliament against other Acts of Parliament? Surely that is strictly a matter for Parliamentary debate, if they want to amend previous Acts with popular mandate, why can they not do that? Some Nazi officials were elected, but the Nazi government itself was constitutionally appointed, not elected, in much the same way as a judge is constitutionally appointed and not elected. No, what the Supreme Court did in this case was to take something that had been made illegal by an Act of Parliament and make it legal. Basically, they changed the laws. They changed the Criminal Code by taking a section of it and declaring it null and void.

Hitler's rise to the Chancellorship was largely the result of backroom dealings between Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg and Hitler. The last election prior to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor was in July 1932, and he only got 37% of the vote. The appointment was constitutional but Braniac's statement that "the Nazi Party of Germany was a group of elected officials" is just dead wrong.

Whatever. Given your knowledge of history and laws, I see no reason to take that statement seriously at all. See this thread for that.

Yes, it is. Courts of law are there to interpret law and to apply it correctly to specific cases. They are not there to change laws, over-ride laws or create new laws, those are the tasks of Parliament. Your example is invalid, which you can see if you turn it on it's head. Let's say the government of Canada passes (or has passed, in this case) a bill saying that a person may not be detained without a fair trial. However, a panel of unelected judges decides that that is not in keeping with their vision of Canada and over-turns the law, ruling that a person may be arrested and detained indefinitely without ever being tried in front of a jury of 12 of his peers. It's about as likely as your example, so what say you? Bzzzt. Wrong. Go back and study German history, 1933. The Charter itself is the result of a Parliamentary Act. In keeping with what you are saying, there should be nothing stopping a panel of judges from striking down the precious Charter itself. And as I said, the Charter itself upholds discrimination and bigotry based on ethnicity, gender, religion, age and handicap. Bzzzt. Wrong again. We do have an abortion law in Canada. Parliament passed an amendment to Section 251 of the Criminal Code, legalising therapeutic abortion in 1969, but the Supreme Court decided that wasn't good enough (again) and changed it to abortion-on-demand, for any or no reason, at any time, in 1988.

When Parliament has set out a law that states that same-sex marriage is illegal, and a court actually reverses that, that goes beyond interpretation. That is changing a law and it should not be within the power of a non-elected body to do that. The Charter is a document that perpetuates the problems of discrimination. See paragraph 15, subsection 2. Besides which, the Charter itself is a product of Parliament (Constitution Act, 1982) and thus, apparently, a court could choose to disregard it or even scrap it if it felt so inclined.

Israel was originally a strip of desert with very little going for it. Now it is the most prosperous and productive state in the Middle East, and it owes it all to four things: democracy, free markets, the will of its people and Western, specifically American, backing. Now Iraq will have those things too, and I confidently predict that in short order Iraq will become a free and prosperous state. In time they may even out-do Israel, since they have oil wealth to further drive their economy. It certainly seems that the majority of Iraqis are truly inspired and wish to make their country a better place now that the shackles are off, and with the support of the West and the advent of democracy and the free market the country will take off. These are exciting times.

If you ask most people who have been highly promiscuous they will usually tell you that they have regrets. Sleeping with a man because he bought you dinner just makes you a very cheap whore, and the feeling is similar in a lot of cases. I'm not saying that I want to preach fire and brimstone to young people, what I am saying is that it's foolish to believe that all sex is good, and that it never has any negative psychological side-effects. It frequently does, and we should be honest with people about that. This argument is born from ignorance. People see a baby in an incubator born 15 weeks prematurely, and they know it is a tiny, helpless baby. Nobody crowds around the glass and says, "Well, it's just a clump of cells. Just a potential human. It isn't a person. I don't see why I should respect it's right to live." Yet there is no physical difference between that preemie and a fetus at 25 weeks gestation. I invite you to actually study some photographs of the unborn in the womb and read actual medical facts about their development. That should be enough to dispel your illusions. For instance, by the time that over 90% of abortions are performed the fetus is capable of feeling pain. No. The end goal has to be abolition of abortion, for the reasons I gave. Law reflects our ideal ethics and morality, and if our law permits us to kill the most vulnerable members of our society on a whim then, whatever the actual case, we cannot claim to have good ethics because we have stated that, in our ideal world, killing the innocent for convenience is acceptable. It is not in mine.

Such as when the Divisional Court of Ontario over-rode a Parliamentary decision from 1999 not to allow same-sex marriage? The courts can no longer be trusted not to meddle in lawmaking or change laws on a whim. Don't be naive.

What I would like to see implemented would be the abolition of 3rd and possibly 2nd trimester abortions, and the scheme that KK first posited to have adoptive families pay a cash sum to a woman who bears a child that they adopt. I would also like to see abstinence put forward more seriously in sex-ed classes and in popular culture. STDs and teen pregnancy are both on the rise, and I feel the problem is that pop culture tells kids to screw anything that moves, and the moral voices of our society are busy telling kids that it's all good and natural to be having sex with anything that moves, and that we should explore ourselves and our sexuality et cetera, et cetera. After all, if it is considered irresponsible to promote drug abuse and violence in pop culture, why can't we decide it's irresponsible to promote teenage promiscuity? I think we are under the collective illusion that any sex is good and sex is the most important thing in human existence, and we need to dispel that. I would anticipate that these measures would drastically reduce the number of abortions performed and move us away from a depraved culture that endorses killing children for the convenience of adults. Once that is done, it should be an easier matter to outlaw abortion altogether. I am adamant that any progress we make needs to be towards this eventual goal. Law reflects the goals of society. We would like everybody to be law-abiding, so laws reflect the ideals of how we would like to be. Since none of us want to be baby-killers, the law should, eventually, reflect that. It will not be an easy process as we have had over 30 years of brain-washing from the pro-abort advocates, but I am confident that we can get there. I do, of course, support abortion only in the event that the pregnancy poses a genuine and serious threat to the mother's life, such as in the case of ectopic pregnancy. In this case, there is nothing to gain by refusing abortion anyhow since the death of the mother inevitably means the death of her unborn child as well.

This makes absolutely no sense! Do you believe that between 1933 and 1945, the rest of the world wanted Hitler in power, because the German people did? Rubbish. It's entirely probable that the Iraqi people want to be occupied, since the occupation is far, far less brutal than the regime that preceded it. On the other hand, in the rest of the world suckers like you are drinking hand-wringing news stories about quagmires and so forth, and insisting that the Coalition be made to get out. And what do you think 'the truth' might be - that Saddam was really a nice guy, and the graves containing 300,000 of his political enemies aren't really there, and the torture and rape chambers are really S&M nightclubs? We know the truth about Saddam. He was a brutal despot and a butcher of innocents who modeled himself on history's worst criminals. I would like Saddam to be tried in a genuine court of law, because then the facts about him might actually be told in a way that would get through to people like you. But I doubt it.

It's difficult to tell. Only Wilde knew for sure, and he's dead now. That's why I urge you to exercise caution when quoting him, or indeed any source given to these kind of statements. If you are asking me what I feel his field of genius was, it was his writing of fictional works and humour. A genius of economic theory would be a man such as Adam Smith, not Oscar Wilde. You might as well say that Einstein's genius makes him an authority on agriculture.

I would be very careful when quoting Wilde to prove a political point. He is deliberately vague, sometimes contradictory, given to making statements for purely inflammatory value, and often speaking with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Yes, he was a genius - but not for his political and economic theory.

Craig, There is serious doubt about many characters in history. Many Chinese historians now believe that both Sun-Tzu and Lao Tzu were composites, however, this does not invalidate either the Art of War or the Tao. What bothers me is that usually, people questioning the existence of Christ are not interested in genuine historical inquiry but in Christianity-bashing, as though if they could prove that Christ never lived, they could dissolve the Christian faith. An example is the very writer that Vercingetorix cited, a lifelong hater of Christians and their faith, who wrote a scathing document full of outright lies, fabrications and groundless assumption that Vercingetorix made the mistake of taking at face value. This is what muddies the waters so, any questioning of the existence of Christ is sullied with inflammatory and dubious statements about the faith of Christianity. To sum up, I don't see any conclusive evidence that Christ existed. I don't see any conclusive evidence that he did not, either. I also see that proponents of both viewpoints almost invariably have a vested interest: either they are Christian, or vehemently anti-Christian. The fact is that to believe you must have at least a little faith. How do you know your wife is not having an affair? Unless you watch her 24/7, you do not know for a fact that she is faithful to you. You have some evidence (when she says she is going shopping, she comes back with shopping bags full of goods, when she says she is going to the gym, she comes back out of breath) but nothing can conclusively prove that she is faithful to you. But you have faith. You love and trust your wife, so you believe that she is not having an affair and, if someone were to ask you if your wife was faithful, you would answer "Yes" without reservation.

What grounds do you have for denying humanity to an unborn child? Whatever grounds you find can be applied to at least one group of people already born. If my wife and I are thinking of having another child, that is a hypothetical person. An unborn child is not a hypothetical person, it is an actual person. All that is required for personhood is membership in the human race, and unborn children have that. So an unborn child is not an individual human being. What is it, then? A fish? A table? Before you reply "a fetus", "a blastocyst" etc. you should note that these are all scientific terms used to denote any organism at different stages of development, much like "adolescent" or "toddler". You cannot have "a foetus", what you mean is "a human foetus", "a chimpanzee foetus" or whatever. The quotes you gave are all wholly arbitrary, without justification. Try substituting "Jew" for "foetus" throughout that document. What does that remind you of?

Pre-communist Russia and China were leading food producers and were net exporters of foodstuffs. After the Communists took over in each country, massive famines occurred. Approximately 30 million died of hunger in each country. It took both countries decades to become net exporters of foodstuffs again. Despite your hysterical anti-capitalist-running-dog nonsense, the USA actually exported large amounts of grain to the USSR, without which even more millions of Russians would have starved in a country that used to be the breadbasket of the world. So... how does foreign capitalism cause a peasant, agrarian economy to stop producing food for it's own people? Simple: it doesn't. The massive famines in Communist nations are due to the failure of Communism as a system and the ineptitude and stupidity of Communist leaders such as Mao and Stalin. If you study Chinese and Russian history you'll find that very little of their famines can be blamed on natural disasters, wars and so forth, most of it can be laid at the door of collectivisation and asinine industrial "progress" such as the Great Leap Forward in China, which succeeded in creating a famine in the countryside and achieved a great increase in the production of steel of such low quality it was worthless for practically any application. Communism does not work. History will teach you this if you are willing to listen.

Well, firstly we do have the accounts of Josephus, Suetonius and the miscellaneous Hebrew critics of Jesus. Secondly, I don't believe that hard evidence would really prove anything. Just look at the Turin Shroud and the surrounding controversy, it's existence has succeeded in proving absolutely nothing, either way.

Quite so. I remember an incident in Montreal where a group of feminists vandalised and desecrated a church, assaulted the clergymen and burned a cross on the steps. Hedy Fry didn't bat an eyelid - but you can bet that if a bunch of Christians had broken into and vandalised a gay bath house and assaulted the patrons there would have been hell to pay.

I already gave the cases to which I refer earlier in this thread. I will here cut and paste what I wrote already for you. For example, a woman whose husband was killed in a work-related accident successfully sued his employer and was awarded damages both for herself and specifically and separately for their unborn child. Canadian law is very schizophrenic when it comes to the rights of the unborn. I would not look to it for any definitive answers on the abortion question if I were you.

As 50% of aborted children are female, I would like to ask you how you can dissolve a woman in saline solution, tear her limb from limb with forceps or stab her in the back of the skull and suction out her brain without "interfering with her physical and bodily integrity", please. Each person should have the right to personal autonomy as far as possible, however, the right to life is a more important right since without it, there can be no other rights. In our society, we only grant rights so long as they do not impinge upon the rights of others. For example, you have the right to drive a car if you hold a valid license, however, if you deliberately run down pedestrians you will be stripped of your right to drive, because the right of pedestrians to live overrides your right to drive. Abortion is a clear case of the right of one individual to personal autonomy (the mother) being pitched against the more fundamental right to life of another (the child). In all other cases, we would rule in favour of the individual whose life is being endangered by the exercise of another individual's so-called rights - but not in abortion. In the case of abortion, the convenience of one individual is held to be more precious than the very life of another, as it was in the Holocaust, as it was with slavery. If this is just, then that means that the Holocaust and slavery were also just and right since they, too, valued the convenience of one group of individuals (Nazis, slaveowners, mothers) more highly than the lives of another group of individuals (Jews, Negroes, unborn children). Furthermore, since you bring up the justice of Canadian law, can you explain to me why it is that according to Canadian law, the unborn can own and inherit property and be a plaintiff in a civil suit, but cannot be protected from murder?

Does that mean that the world should care less about human rights? Leeches connect physically to your body, as do all sorts of other parasites and interlopers. Does that make them part of your body? This is a stupid argument, and one that has absolutely no grounding in science.