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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (2652)	5/20/2003 11:48:36 PM
From: Gulo	Respond to of 37263

Interesting that arrests would go up with decriminalization. In any case, I would much rather have widespread application of a tolerable law than arbitrary application of a draconian law.

To: marcos who wrote (2652)	5/21/2003 8:27:07 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Respond to of 37263

Trudeau a 'showoff,' diplomat told U.S. Claiming to be a Communist showed his 'desire to shock' Elizabeth Thompson CanWest News Service Wednesday, May 21, 2003 ADVERTISEMENT A top Canadian diplomat told the United States that Pierre Trudeau was "a showoff" and "an individual not possessing much common sense," in a bid to allay concerns that Communists had infiltrated the Canadian government, according to secret U.S. State Department documents. In a two-page Memorandum of Conversation dated May 7, 1952, a U.S. State Department official recounts a conversation with George Ignatieff, then second-in-command at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, who approached him to discuss Mr. Trudeau's "indiscreet" behaviour at a conference in Moscow. "The Canadians describe him as young and adventurous with a desire to travel and as an individual not possessing much common sense," wrote H. Raynor, director of the State Department's British North America section. The Memorandum of Conversation was classified "secret security information" for more than 50 years until it was declassified following a request from the Montreal Gazette. The document sheds new light on Canada's relations with the U.S. during the Cold War and the McCarthy era -- a period when the U.S. was obsessed with fighting communism. It could also help explain why the Federal Bureau of Investigation accumulated a voluminous file on the former prime minister. It all began when Mr. Trudeau, then 32, decided to attend an economic conference in the Soviet Union. In what Canadian chargé d'affaires Robert Ford later described as "an infantile desire to shock," Mr. Trudeau told the wife of U.S. chargé d'affaires Hugh Cumming that he was a Communist and a Catholic, then went on to criticize the U.S. and praise the Soviet Union. Concerned that the incident involving a former Privy Council employee would undermine U.S. estimates of Canada's security, Mr. Ignatieff was dispatched in what appears to be a pre-emptive strike. "In view of certain indiscreet remarks and perhaps behaviour while at Moscow, the Canadians imagine we may receive a report from our Embassy about his activity," wrote Mr. Raynor. "The Canadians desire us to know that he is not considered a security risk in Ottawa. While he was formerly employed in the Privy Council's Office, it was in a minor capacity and the Canadians state that he had no access to classified information." Mr. Ignatieff described Mr. Trudeau as "an individual of neutralist sentiments" and did not say whether Mr. Trudeau was a Communist. "Mr. Ignatieff said that he did not know whether or not in fact he was a Communist." Ottawa historical researcher Christopher Cook, who uncovered Mr. Ford's memo to the Canadian government about the incident, said the U.S. might have kept the State Department document secret to protect the Canadian government. "They might have felt that they were protecting the Canadian government from embarrassment about the fact that they approached the U.S. government on Canadian citizens and this issue of whether they can be trusted or not." © Copyright 2003 The Ottawa Citizen

To: marcos who wrote (2652)	5/22/2003 11:28:28 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 37263

U.S. hockey fans smack 'communist' Canadians 'Nightmare' of political venom spewed against Ottawans for anti-war position -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 21, 2003 5:00 p.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com They went to a hockey game, and a fight broke out – but not on the ice. A war of words over the Iraq conflict erupted into an international skirmish Saturday night as a group of Canadian fans say they were verbally and physically attacked by overzealous Americans, reports the Ottawa Citizen. Four residents of Canada's capital city drove south of the border to attend Game 4 of the NHL playoffs between the Ottawa Senators and the New Jersey Devils in East Rutherford, N.J., only to be called names including "f---ing communists." "They told us they were disgusted by our presence," Lee Piazza told the Citizen. "They called us [pansies] for not participating in the war on Iraq. All of these people were full-grown men." Piazza and his friends Ted Mirsky, Brian Herman and Mike Prior, all 18, were decked out in Senators and Canadian national team jerseys, with Mirsky draping a Canadian flag over his shoulders. Even before the game started, some fans reportedly booed when the Canadian national anthem was played. "We told one young man that he had no right to mock an entire nation and that we were here to see a game, not engage in a foreign-policy debate," Piazza told the paper. Piazza says a Devils fan grabbed his sign in the first intermission and threatened to knock him out, while people in the washroom told Mirsky they were going to burn his flag. "By now, we were feeling uneasy and we were sticking together," Piazza told the Citizen. On the smoking patio in the second break, they were surrounded by dozens of people yelling obscenities, calling them terrorists and shouting "SARS." One American reportedly tried to butt his cigarette on Mirsky's flag. While leaving their seats after the game, Prior and Mirsky were physically attacked by two men, and all four got involved before security guards pulled them apart. Piazza told the paper the situation outside in the parking lot became a "battlefield." "Dozens of people threw food at us, uttered discriminatory insults, shoved us, pointed at us and laughed at us. It felt like a nightmare. The hate directed toward us was like nothing any of us had experienced before," he said. Six police officers were needed to safely escort the Canadians to their car. "I can't even imagine how some minority groups must feel [being] subjected to this kind of discrimination on a daily basis. For me, the 2003 Stanley Cup playoffs have lost their innocence," Piazza said. The situation is reminiscent of another hockey-related skirmish between Americans and Canadians which involved children in a youth league. As WorldNetDaily reported, a road trip for a group of U.S. peewee hockey players to a tournament in Montreal in March turned into a foray into enemy territory as the boys were barraged with anti-American insults and witnessed protesters trashing the American flag. worldnetdaily.com

To: marcos who wrote (2652)	5/26/2003 8:29:39 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37263

Congo tragedy shows up the UN Lewis MacKenzie National Post Monday, May 26, 2003 If it weren't so tragic it would be tedious reflecting on the United Nations' abject failure to address significant issues of international peace and security in the absence of major support -- both moral and material -- from the United States. Study after study undertaken at the behest of the UN's Secretary-General, the most recent being the year 2000 Brahimi Report, have offered up academic solutions to a disastrous situation that cries out for practical solutions. Lakhdar Brahimi (currently the UN Secretary-General's envoy to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan), following a review of the UN's peacekeeping failures in Srebrenica, Somalia and Rwanda, recommended the UN should avoid sending peacekeepers to a conflict absent a precise and unambiguous mandate, adequate funding and sufficient military force to handle a worst-case scenario. Fast forward to the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A total of six foreign armies and up to 11 factions (at last estimate) are locked in a violent struggle for control of various parts of a resource-rich country the size of Ontario and Quebec combined. Into this morass the UN has inserted a few hundred officer observers -- unarmed --and a few thousand lightly armed soldiers. Their mandate is to help facilitate the implementation of various flawed peace initiatives that are not honoured by the majority of the participants to the conflict. À la Somalia in 1992, the UN troops are virtually blockaded in their barracks and are at the mercy of the drugged, undisciplined and ill-led belligerents who surround them and couldn't give a damn for the UN and the utterances from its headquarters in New York. If you are invited to a knife fight you should always take a gun. But yet again, the UN has taken nothing more than a rucksack of optimism and left a UN commander out to dry. Like it or not, the UN is no longer capable of finding adequate resources, read countries, willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters in uniform for someone else's human rights, unless the conflict threatens world peace and security or is in America's self-interest to get involved. Apply that criteria to the situation in the Congo and you get little interest and no action writ large. Africa, in general, and the complicated situation in the Congo don't register on the "must-do" list of the Security Council. Observers wax eloquent on how the Security Council would have acted to stop the potential genocide in Rwanda in 1993 if only they had known of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire's forecast of genocide and his plea for additional soldiers to try and thwart it. Balls! The Permanent Five veto-holding members of the Security Council knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on in Rwanda and what was being planned by the Hutus than General Dallaire, who had virtually zero intelligence-gathering capability in his tiny command. They chose to do nothing because they had no national self-interests in Rwanda. Estimates put the death toll from the current conflict in the Congo at more than three million since 1998. That figure, along with two million plus slaughtered in Southern Sudan during the same period, should qualify Africa for the front pages of the world. Rape, machete blows indiscriminately removing thousands of children's limbs, child-soldiers forced into service as young as 12 have hardly caused a hint of Western interest. On the other hand, recent claims of cannibalism with the hearts and livers of enemy soldiers being eaten while still warm has caught the attention of the sensationalist-seeking Western press. The Congo is a perfect example of a crisis the UN should be able to resolve without the leadership of the United States -- by deploying the force necessary to sort out the thugs and goons who currently control the streets and jungles. The fact that the UN is not capable of doing so should be the final piece of evidence to convince even the most optimistic among us that it is incapable of carrying out the role assigned it in 1945 as the primary instrument responsible for international peace and security. Those numerous Canadian commentators who call for our immediate participation in the Congo as "peacekeepers" display a disturbing ignorance of the profound change that has taken place regarding conflict since the end of the Cold War. Peacekeeping was a key component of our foreign policy for almost 50 years. It was a good run, but the concept is pretty well dead and buried and it's time for its inventor -- us -- to admit it. Mercifully, countries rarely go to war these days, but factions within countries are fighting in more than 50 conflicts as you read this. If the UN is to take on stopping the slaughter it needs the participation of professional militaries trained for combat in sufficient numbers to defeat -- euphemism for kill in most cases -- the perpetrators of these war crimes. The concept of a neutral and impartial role for the UN in such conflicts is dangerous wishful thinking, and wrong. Like it or not, this fact, based on compelling evidence accumulated over the past decade, should be serious food for thought as the federal government undertakes the long-overdue foreign and defence policy review as promised by prime ministerial contenders Paul Martin and John Manley. Maj-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN troops during the Bosnian civil war of 1992. © Copyright 2003 National Post