Scotty

First of all, I don't visit primitive places, nor have I the desire to do so. Second, murder is against the law in every country of the world. It's just that in some of them, women are of such little importance, and corruption so endemic, that nothing it done to the killers of women except when their families push hard for it. And if the families themselves kill them, well, nobody else is going to care.

These people are trying to get into Canada, trying to become citizens, to stay here, because life is better here. If they find our abhorrence of their backward cultural practices to be insulting they are MORE than free to pick up and get the hell out. Frankly, I wouldn't want anyone in Canada who is insulted by that.

I think that we can influence them by many ways. I certainly think telling them Canadians consider this practice to be barbaric conveys the depths of our repugnance at not only anyone carrying out such a crime but at anyone who would support the carrying out of such a crime. It conveys the level of our intolerance for that sort of ignorant, backward thinking, not merely to the perpetrators, but to members of certain communities.

Well then, why are you even on this thread talking about the need to respect that yokel? Most people in Canada have their sons circumcised. I'm not quite sure in what strange synaptic meltdown you decided that was the equivalent to murdering young women, though.

I'm not sure why you think we ought to, or in some way ought to feel ourselves required to respect something we might find abhorrent, disgusting or depraved. I don't feel myself bound in any way to respect cultural practices I consider backward, violent and barbaric. Hell, I don't feel myself bound to respect practices I simply consider dumb! And in this case we're talking about murder as a 'cultural practice'. The belief we ought to somehow respect that is simply something I don't understand. Can I say "I respect your belief, my friend" and then put a bullet in their face for trying to practice that belief? Because this is a 'cultural practice' which any Canadian is legally permitted to prevent by any means up to and including killing the person trying to carry it out.

My company says accessing or emailing pornography is totally unacceptable. I think murdering little girls ought to be several dozen orders of magnitude above that. ,Like, so, if some ignorant yokel from some backward religious culture is trying to murder you it's barbaric to kill him? You need to rethink that.

No, actually, we don't.

They'll start an intensive course of prayers immediately, and no doubt the kid will be laughing and dancing by noon tomorrow.

Outsourcing is done for two reasons. The first reason is the day to day hiring of lower level staff on a temporary and semi temporary basis. This is done because government hiring systems are horrifically complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Say you want to hire a temporary clerk to see to an expected surge in work, and you need them for one month. It will take you about a year to go through all the processes in order to hire them. Far easier and cheaper to just hire a temp. The second reason is the hiring of highly skilled/experienced consultants at a higher level, for IT and management consulting. The government has to hire them externally because, while this might go against the grain to those who hate the public service, public service salaries are too low to attract or keep these types of people. They can make far more in the private sector. The wage differential between the public and private sector (at higher levels) has been growing for some years now, which is why the government has to hire private sector 'consultants' for a lot of jobs.

Yeah, Bettman has been pretty clear. I think if he had his way the franchises in Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary would be removed and sent down to Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and New Mexico. Bettman wants US expansion at any cost, and he doesn't give a shit what happens in Canada. In fact, he resents the Canadian teams because most of them don't sell well when they're playing at US arenas. And if the NHL has to actually pay millions of dollars to operate those teams because no one wants to watch them, then that's exactly what it will do. His entire reason for existence is advancing hockey in the US in a desperate, pathetic hope of getting a network contract down there. And the fewer Canadian teams the better.

Wow. Amazing example of bureaucratic incompetence. Not the union's fault, though. You'll note where it said In some cases, teachers have been known to wait for three years before they are told what they are alleged to have done wrong. So the teachers are alleged to have done something wrong, removed from the classroom, and ordered to go to this place instead and do nothing, while the employer slowly, slowly, slowly tries to figure out what misdeeds they want to charge the teacher with and what support there is to punish or remove them. And you blame that on the union? As I said, long, arcane processes for disciplining or removing bad employees are invariably the fault of the employer. Now, of course, if this was the private sector, they could simply fire the teacher. But they need just cause or the teacher can sue them. And since the employer knows whatever cause they have is going to be scrutinized by the union they're being very, very careful to get all their ducks in a row and have them all reviewed - probably multiple times - by lawyers. Again, that's the fault of management incompetence, not the union.

I doubt they're as callous as they seem. There is a certain mindset which says black humour, acting outrageous, somehow makes you seem dark and tough and edgy, and I think that's what these people are going for. It's easy to do from afar, especially when you don't know anyone involved. Immaturity helps, too, of course, and a lack of empathy.

I didn't see any mounties in any of those videos. However, we saw a lot of Toronto police acting up, and the Toronto government has not seen fit to do anything about that. Further, the Ontario government, which oversees municipal police, has also not seen fit to do anything about it. Those are where you should direct your anger, not at Harper.

I would think it entirely appropriate those individuals should pay for the cost of the vandalism they did. but we put murderers in jail for ten years. We don't put vandals in jail except in exceptional circumstances. I think all those caught should have to pay back the cost of the damage and then do quite a bit of community service. The police had no right to hold them in the first place. The police assaulted people for no reason. IMHO those cops should be charged with assault and forcible confinement.

The only difference between an employer's ability to fire a unionized employee and the private sector's ability to fire one of their employees is that the unionized employee has someone there to back him up if the firing is unjustified according to law. For the private sector employee, recourse to the courts is normally prohibitively expensive, so he's screwed. But in theory, private sector workers have the same rights with regard to the termination of their employment as unionized employees. They just have no one to see to the enforcement of those rights.

Taxes are raised because new programs are implimented. That's not decided by unions, though of course, unionized workers do implement the programs. If you don't want taxes to go up, then stop bringing in new programs, and cut some of the wasteful ones. Every level of government has tons of those. Idiotic statements. If unionized workers didn't have to work then, for the most part, they wouldn't. Yet clearly, they do. As for being fired, the complexity of the firing and disciplinary process is almost always the result of the employer's decisions and policies, which are guided by lawyers. Any time a lawyer decides a process, especially in conjunction with the idiots who make up HR departments you're going to get a very complex and time-consuming system.

How often? For what reason? How long have they worked there? There are a variety of factors involved. I wouldn't automatically fire anyone for falling asleep on the job.

The number of people within your borders has zero to do with whether you are or aren't isolated. Isolation is both a geographical and psychological fact of life for most Americans. You know little or nothing about other people around the world, and don't want to know. Like Sara I-know-Russia-I-saw-it-on-the-horizon-once Palin you are remarkably ignorant about the geopolitical and historical realities of the world beyond your shores because the goings on out there don't interest you.

It might well be a crime but I doubt it would be murder. You can't kill someone after they've already died. So far as I know, brain death - where that can be determined - is the standard medical protocol for ascertaining death.

Get real. You don't put people in prison for 5 years for breaking a freaking window. AS to the cars, there were probably one or two people who actually set them alite, and I wouldn't say no to a year in jail for them. But the vast bulk of the protesters didn't do anything wrong. Why would that matter?

They are both outrageous.

I agree, and McGuinty should have held public hearings on it, but declined, for the obvious reason that a lot of the blame might wind up being assigned to him. Still and all, it's clearly the fault of the Toronto police, and so up to the Toronto politicians, or ultimately, the provincial government which oversees all policing in Ontario. It's not up to Harper.

And the RCMP were inside the fence. What happened outside the fence was not really the concern of the federal government.

It is BRAIN DEAD. Perhaps Republicans don't take this as a sign of mortality given much of their leadership has been similarly described, but most of the rest of the world feels differently.

That argument is inane, to say the least.