Our charter of rights supercedes our constitution, therefore no Government of any day can ammend the constitution to suit their liking because it would get overturned in the courts.
That's just silly. I want strong protection for rights but to not allow any amendment of a constitution (and if your charter of rights is the supreme law within its area it basically is constitutional law) apparently assumes that you believe that the current opinion about the issues covered is not only perfect but will fit Canadian society without change forever. But even such inflexibility doesn't really protect basic rights. Rights are protected by people, law is just a tool to do that. Laws (or constitutions or charters) can be ignored or the courts can interpret them in ways that differ from their plain meaning or their original intent.
Bush would like to ammend the constitution to prevent gay marriage
Which once again is not a rights issue, and which isn't going anywhere anyway.
"For the fourth year in a row, the United Nations has ranked Norway as having the highest standard of living in the world." does not equal "Norway still the world's best place to live" . Judgements about standards of living or best place to live are both subjective, esp. "best place to live". Ask 20 people and might get ten + answers, maybe 20 if your very specific about the place, your unlikely to get one. In any case it isn't really relevant to anything that I have been saying, or even to anything you said earlier in the conversation. Norway isn't Canada or the US, and "best place to live", or "highest standard of living", isn't "most free" (although there is a correlation between freedom and the other two).
Researchers for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) also weighed countries' degrees of cultural freedom in their analysis.
You provide no definition for this "cultural freedom". I'm more interested in simple freedom. If you are largely free from government limitations against you your free in cultural areas as well. I guess (but can not be sure without a definition), that what is meant by "cultural freedom" is really more like tolerance. Tolerance is a good thing which can also increase freedom, but that word gets stretched a lot to mean acceptance (which is beyond mere tolerance) of certain things, while allowing for a lack of even tolerance for many other things that the user of the term doesn't like.
The worst countries in which to live are all in Africa
In general that statement is probably pretty accurate, but I think they should look to North Korea as well. A Stalinist level of repression combined with starvation.
Of course we are getting pretty far away from the topic of this thread, or even from our initial points started to move away from being strictly on the topic. Even if Norway is "the best place to live" it says little about Canada or the US, and almost nothing about what should or should not be done with the health care system in the US. Nor does it address the fact that socialized health care decreases freedom. Even if it was accepted that its other benefits outweighed the loss the loss should still be faced not ignored.
Tim |
