Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
It looks like a fine day for Remembrance Day this year – no lashings of sleet as if often the case.
It is still hard to understand why Ontario is not on full shut down today but it was good to see the kids have a pretty full week of activities in elementary school based on remembrance. I wrote this last year. I suppose I think today more than any other of great-uncle John as a teen ninety years ago in the trenches.
I listened to the first edition of the new afternoon Radio 2 to 4 show Freestyle as I worked away yesterday and I was not upset at all. New CBC things usually get quite upsetting but this did not.
To be fair, host Kelly Ryan was one of my favorite people in the undergrad gang and I like to hear her brightness mid-afternoon. People will get moany about things like the pop music being played seeing as it is just twenty years since they removed classical music – was it RSVP? – from the afternoons on CBC 1. That’s kinda breakneck whiplashy for Canada.
I hope that Kelly’s news background and interviewing strength will come through more and more especially with their use a technique of no introductions to interviews used on BBC radio which gives a bit of pace. It will find its place.
I just came across the searchable, on-line, member’s only archive of the Canadian Bar Review which I immediately whirled into use to find my favorite law journal article of all time “The Early Provincial Constitutions” by J.E.Read from 1948. Classic nerd knowledge fills every page: The content of that ur-document the Letters of Patent for Nova Scotia from 1749, the fact that the British Empire was a unitary state without rival sovereignty, the cite for Re Cape Breton (1846), 5 Moo P.C. 259 confirming the use of Royal prerogative to unify two colonies into one.
Wow. Neato. I’ll be back to you guys later.
There are plenty of folk who use blogs – imagine – to blindly criticize our fair land, saying it is a shame that we do not have standing armed forces of 250,000 to rattle our swords now and then, saying it is a shame that we are taxed for sensible public services looking with envy southward where conservatives get to spend but not pay for it, saying that it is a shame we let people actually live as and with whom and how they decide without asking for permission. So it is good to be reminded that Canada is doing very well these days as it has been doing for quite some time. We’ve even it the lowest unemployment rate for 30 years despite the dollar being now about 25% higher in relation to our largest customer compared to where it was about two years ago.
You wonder when some folk would ever be happy.
Interesting to read that my old pal from Halifax days, Kelly Ryan, is reviving her radio host career started twenty years ago when she did CBC Halifax’s weekend wake-up show. Once I goaded her into referring her co-host as “L-7” and “four corners” based on the Flinstone’s beat poet episode of another twenty years earlier. I think she got into news not long after that. Kelly has had some grim national radio news reporting jobs like 9/11 and the Picton mass murders. With her sense of humour, I have high hopes for this show.
I am a little more concered with the Globe’s report on what will happen with the CBC Radio 1 11 am to noon slot:
The new programming will kick off in the late morning, before local noon-hour shows, with host Jian Ghomeshi’s The National Playlist, which will feature musicians, actors and politicians debating their favourite songs. Listeners will also be able to call in to kick songs off the continually evolving play list. CBC is billing it as an iPod play list debated nationally every weekday.
Gee – Jian is going to rate songs…like he has for about 3 years now in unending repeats. Nice pandering to the iPod bubble, too. I have low expectations but it is nice to see, at least, that the Ghost of Peter Gzowsky Past may have less air time.
NPR is reporting Meirs has withdrawn her nomination for the US Supreme Court but it is not on CNN or any Google news. Has radio wons this race?
I read John Gushue in St. John’s every morning on the CBC lockout situation just as I read him every morning before. He certainly puts a human face on the situation as well as a fairly neutral presentation on events. But, underneath all that neutrality, what strikes me from all this is there is absolutely no plan from management to improve anything with the CBC services that do, as some more fiscally conservative than me point out, draw a fairly significant amount from the public purse – though pennies a day to each of us.
As we are not locally serviced by CBC radio – not by even a bureau – the St. Lawrence Valley of Ontario is perhaps not as shocked as places like the North where my undergrad pal and fellow crow Dave White (now only a Google cache) hosts in Yukon or in the Maritimes where the economy or interests practically bar the development of robust independent news services. But still, for all this disruption nationally, it would be nice to have the slightest clue that there is a basis in service rather than labour relations justifying the lockout. It is odd as a Canadian to watch from time to time when the BBC explains itself and its future plans to the British public or listen to NPR do phone-ins on what the audience would like to have presented. Sometimes I think that CBC management treats the audience like a sector of its labour force, needing only to be told what’s good for it.
Looks like the public only find the new Tory TV ads useful for identifying the people they plan not to vote for:
The federal Liberals had the support of 40 per cent of respondents in a new poll — virtually the same level of backing they received in rolling to their majority government in 2000. The Leger Marketing survey, conducted Sept. 6-11, pegged Conservative support at 24 per cent, while the NDP stood at 15 per cent and the Bloc Quebecois at 13 per cent. The numbers were reached after distribution of the 20 per cent of respondents who were undecided.
I wrote this over at Michael’s place:
If you look at the Louisiana Constitution it does state:
The military shall be subordinate to the civil power.
This does allow for directed the legitimate use of the military by civil officials and, while what you say about unarmed people is entirely correct – who cares if they have seven DVD players – there is also this (from CNN):
Before Thursday night fell, police were stopping anyone they saw on the street and warning them that they were not safe from armed bands of young men who were attacking people and attempting to rape women.
That is not looting. That is organized violent opposition. How can you deal with an evacuation, dealing with fires and exploding chemical train cars, removing the dead if you also have people sniping at you. What happens if it does not dissipate of its own accord? An organized civilly directed use of military force in an urban setting may be required.
What an awful prospect.
Having officials threaten use of a standing army against the population may well responate with Americans more than elsewhere given what gave rise to their nation. That is why state constitutions speak against military rule under any circumstances. There may, however, have to be some use of the military by civic officials which may not be as random as suggested in this perhaps rash statement by the Governor:
She said Thursday night that 300 soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard had arrived — “fresh back from Iraq. These are some of the 40,000 extra troops that I have demanded,” Blanco said. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded … I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”
For the military to engage rather than just take up the good cause of assisting in a disaster, there would have to be a plan which they would accept operating under. The sort of planning I think John does. For one soldier to fire, however, just takes a sniping idiot. And they seem to exist.
I think the Flea is right, though. I think in Canada the lads in green would have been in a wee bit earlier. But it would have been both as assistance and less about deterrence perhaps – but we are a different country with different expectations and comfort levels. In the end it is all so hard to compare and judge which is what makes it awful.
The good Flea makes an empassioned plea for the use of the charge of treason against those who would bomb we citizens in a twisted and pointless efforts to over-throw democracy. They do not know that the very rocks and trees of the Canadian Shield would vote somewhere between 12 and 18% for NPD every 3.5 to 4.5 years if we were all blown to bits taking mass trans of a morning.
But there is still reason to review our law and…did you know…there is still both high and also regular ethanol treason here in the law of the Great White North:
46. (1) Every one commits high treason who, in Canada,
(a) kills or attempts to kill Her Majesty, or does her any bodily harm tending to death or destruction, maims or wounds her, or imprisons or restrains her;
(b) levies war against Canada or does any act preparatory thereto; or
(c) assists an enemy at war with Canada, or any armed forces against whom Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities, whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are.(2) Every one commits treason who, in Canada,
(a) uses force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province;
(b) without lawful authority, communicates or makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada, military or scientific information or any sketch, plan, model, article, note or document of a military or scientific character that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada;
(c) conspires with any person to commit high treason or to do anything mentioned in paragraph (a);
(d) forms an intention to do anything that is high treason or that is mentioned in paragraph (a) and manifests that intention by an overt act; or
(e) conspires with any person to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) or forms an intention to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) and manifests that intention by an overt act.(3) Notwithstanding subsection (1) or (2), a Canadian citizen or a person who owes allegiance to Her Majesty in right of Canada,
(a) commits high treason if, while in or out of Canada, he does anything mentioned in subsection (1); or
(b) commits treason if, while in or out of Canada, he does anything mentioned in subsection (2).(4) Where it is treason to conspire with any person, the act of conspiring is an overt act of treason.
So even though we have newish post-9/11 trendy terrorism crimes set out in Part II.1 of the Act, there is some pretty beefy good old Victorian things to think about in the sweet section of the Criminal Code of Canada pasted above. Sadly, while we may bicker about “what is war,” high treason is perhaps beyond the scope of your average un-nationed freelance early 21st century jihadista – unless they go for the Queen – but it is nice to note, personally at least, that conspiring for the violent over-throw of Saskatchewan whether one is at home or away is treason nonetheless.
And it is a nice touch that the minimum sentence for high treason is life under 47(4).