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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (60611)	12/9/2002 11:00:26 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

A short note for our Canadian Friends. WSJ.com Worthwhile Canadian Initiative "What does the United States have that Canada doesn't?" asks the Web site CanadasBrainDrain.ca. "Answer: Thousands of Canada's most talented young minds." That's right, our friends the Canadians have a problem with "brain drain." The crushing burden of a gargantuan welfare state, combined with rotten weather and the metric system, drives Canada's best and brightest across the border to America. What can be done? The weather is pretty much a given, though perhaps the great white north will get some relief in the long run if the global-warming myth turns out to be true after all. Changing policy for the better seems like a long shot. After all, Canada is a democracy, and thanks to brain drain it is an increasingly stupid democracy, so it's likely, if anything, to adopt ever-more-pinheaded policies. But wait. What if there were a way to neutralize the effect of brain drain by getting idiots to leave Canada too? The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reports that just such an initiative is under way: Some Canadians already have left for Iraq to serve as human shields against bomb attacks on Baghdad. More will follow before Christmas. Irene Vandas and Jennifer Ziemann of Vancouver are heading to Iraq on Friday. Vandas, a 32-year-old registered nurse, and Ziemann, a 30-year-old home-care worker, will fly to Amsterdam, board a plane to Amman, Jordan, then drive into Iraq all the way to Baghdad where they will live with Iraqi civilians. There, they will join friends Linda Morgan and Irene MacInnes, two Canadians who travelled to Iraq in mid-November. The four Canadians, sponsored by an anti-war organization called Voices in the Wilderness, have volunteered to be human shields in an effort to dissuade American-led forces from attacking Iraq. Some will no doubt argue that it's unfair to inflict these nincompoops on Iraq, a country that will soon be recovering from decades of dictatorship. God forbid the Canadian "human shields" actually get themselves killed defending Saddam, though this would raise the average IQ of both countries.