When is the right time to give up on a life?
Euthanasia remains a hot topic as hearings on assisted suicide continue in Québec.
It’s one of those things that none of us want to contemplate. How difficult would it be to end the life of a loved one, even if they were in pain? What about our own life? When is the right time to give up? Public hearings on euthanasia have started in Québec, and pundits are hoping they will spark wider debate.
The Toronto Sun’s David Akin says that Canada’s politicians are severely lagging behind the rest of the country on this issue. “(I)n poll after poll, Canadians have overwhelmingly said they are in favour of changing Canada’s laws to decriminalize assisted suicide,” he writes, “And yet, federal politicians have remained unwilling to act.” Akin also brings up the case of Steven Fletcher, who became a quadriplegic after a 1996 car accident. In the debilitating months afterwards “he wished someone would just pull the plug.” Luckily that didn’t happen, and now he’s the federal minister of democratic reform. He abstained on a vote last year to legalize euthanasia, and instead called more debate on the issue.
Québec lawmakers should be praised for tackling euthanasia, says Howard Elliot in the Hamilton Spectator. “They're not afraid to take on tough social questions, and in that regard other governments across Canada could learn a lesson from them.” Although “today’s 60 was yesteryear’s 40,” the same factors that lead to longer lives will also mean the baby boom generation will live with disease for much longer. That makes euthanasia an issue the rest of the country will have to confront soon enough.
The end of the line for most boomers is still a few decades off, but their opinions about euthanasia will be shaped by their experience of watching their own parents die. For a personal account of this, see Gary Mason’s column in the Globe and Mail. He admits he’d be unable to either condone further treatment to his father, or end his life: “Making sure he’s as comfortable as possible until it’s time to go seems like a just and reasonable accommodation and perhaps the best for which we can hope.”
Book burning makes a comeback
It’s rare commentators reach a consensus on anything, but if there’s one thing they can agree on this week, it’s this: burning the Qur’an is not a good idea.
Despite condemnations from Barack Obama, the Vatican, and even a profession of faith from Stephen Harper, Florida pastor Terry Jones says he’ll forge ahead with plans to burn copies of the Qur’an on September 11.
Many fear the event will be used to incite violence against Western troops, but that’s “beside the point,” according to Lorne Gunter in the National Post. “In the absence of the Koran-burning, the Taliban and other assorted Muslim extremists will find other insults -- real or imagined -- to fan their propaganda flames and fuel their anti-Western hatred,” he writes, “It is foolhardy to think we are dealing with a rational foe.”
While Jones is clearly a minority in America, “in parts of the Muslim world, the counterparts to Terry Jones are not fringe figures but occupy positions of huge political and religious leadership,” says the Ottawa Citizen’s Leonard Stern, “while the reformist voices are the ones relegated to the margins. There will not be peace in the Arab and Muslim worlds until the roles are reversed.”
The Post’s Tasha Kheriddin warns, “hold on to your TV screens, people – they will be filled with images of death-to-America rallies … The world will have seen nothing like this since the publication of anti-Islamic cartoons by a Danish newspaper several years ago.” Muslim reaction to the event is likely to be disproportional, she writes, but Jones’s “medieval attitude” is out of place in the 21st century.
Yet the Toronto Star sees Terry Jones as a thoroughly modern, not medieval, figure. “Pre-Facebook, and pre-9/11, Jones might have singed his incendiary fingers in obscurity, ignored by the world,” says an editorial today. “Not in today’s wired, fraught, polarized atmosphere.”
Never ones for nuance, the Toronto Sun’s editors get directly to the point about their feelings for Jones: “Here's hoping he stands too close to Saturday's flames, and makes it to hell before the Devil knows he's there.”
Yes, a mainstream Western newspaper just wished a man would die and go to hell. Imagine how Muslims around the world feel about him.
Court rules gay men can't donate blood
Gary rights groups say Canadian Blood Services is practicing discrimination, but the court rule says the agency is not bound by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
An Ontario court has upheld the Canadian Blood Services policy of not accepting blood donations from men who have sex with men. The decision angered many gay rights groups, but the blood agency says its policies are designed to protect the safety of recipients, and have nothing to do with stereotypes of homosexual men. In Canada, gay men have a much higher rate of HIV infection and other blood-borne diseases than other Canadians. The ruling means that any man who's had sex with another man since 1977 can legally be barred from giving blood. That year is generally accepted as the time when HIV first appeared in Canada.
Body checks and chequebooks: Who'll pay for Nordiques 2.0?
The Nordiques might return to Québec City, but commentators are calling offside on Harper and Charest's funding of a multi-million dollar arena.
Québec Premier Jean Charest has announced the province will chip in $175-million to build a new $400-million arena in Québec City in an attempt to lure back an NHL franchise. If this not-so-subtle photo-op is any indication, Stephen Harper is about to kick in some cash as well. So good news for hockey fans, right? Unless those fans also happen to pay taxes, according to the pundits.
Harper’s support for a new arena is “blatant chequebook politics,” according to the National Post’s Don Martin, an attempt to buy Québec votes that will end up “pitting West against East, fiscal prudence against profligacy, vote buying in Quebec against voter backlash everywhere else.” Martin speculates “this could be Mr. Harper’s CF-18 moment,” a nod to “that dark Prairie day in 1986” when Brian Mulroney relocated a jet fighter maintenance contract from Winnipeg to Montreal. The resulting political backlash spawned the Reform Party.
A Montreal Gazette editorial says given the amount of debt both the province and country are in, the “promise appears surreal, not to say insane.” Even if the arena is built there’s no guarantee the NHL will grant the city a franchise, and “taxpayers, at any level, will have little interest in buying a $400 million ticket in (NHL commissioner) Gary Bettman's win-an-NHL-team-someday-maybe lottery.” They do really, really want the Nordiques to come back though. They’re planning a les bleus march through the city on October 2.
If the Nordiques 2.0 do ever hit the ice, it will be after all the politicians currently throwing money at Québec are long gone. Charest and Harper “are spending $400 million to score points in what could very well be their last respective election campaigns,” says Philipe Gohier in Maclean’s, “for gains that will be temporary if they materialize at all.” Both would have to win at least one more election to be around once the arena’s finished, and given his massive unpopularity “it’s unlikely Charest could win power again even if he were running against Satan himself dressed up in a Maple Leafs jersey.”
Satan was last seen playing for the Boston Bruins.
Canada’s transferred more than 400 Afghan detainees: report
Despite warnings they could be tortured, the Canadian military has handed over a high number of prisoners to Afghan forces.
The government has previously refused to disclose how many prisoners the Canadian military has transferred to Afghan forces since the start of the war, but a report obtained by the CBC indicates the figure is above 400. That number is six times higher than Britain’s transfers, despite the fact that there are twice as many British forces in the country. The report also recounts an incident in which an Afghan commander bragged to Canadians about beating and torturing prisoners. The Military Police Complaints Commission, which is investigating Amnesty International allegations that Canadian authorities did not do enough to guarantee prisoners would not be tortured, resumes hearings in Ottawa today.
Brain drain reversed: U.S. doctors coming to Canada
Bucking a troubling trend of a decade ago, there is now a net movement of doctors from the U.S. to Canada.
Uncertainty over U.S. health reform, a complicated U.S. health bureaucracy, and the prospect of better pay are luring more U.S. doctors north of the border than at any time in the past fifteen years. Five years ago 10 per cent of Canadian-trained doctors were working the U.S., prompting Canadian legislators to increase doctor fees. Now MDs practicing in Canada get paid more in some specialties than in the U.S., and don’t have to deal with the complicated insurance bureaucracy that sometimes forces U.S. doctors to deal with 40 different companies in order to get paid. Ontario recruited 87 doctors from the U.S. last year, compared to only ten in 2007.
Philippines police may have shot bus hostages, say investigators
For the first time the Philippines government has said that police likely killed some of the eight people who died in a hostage situation last month
An August 23 hostage situation aboard a Manila tourist bus ended in a flurry of bullets and the deaths of eight hostages, including three Canadian citizens. Local investigators are now confirming what many had already suspected, saying that forensic evidence suggests most of the hostages were not shot at close range and that the bullets that killed them were likely fired by police outside the bus. The messy handling of the incident prompted strong condemnation from China and Hong Kong, where most of the tourists on board the bus were from. President Benigno Aquino says that the government is reviewing police practices to ensure authorities are better trained and equipped to deal with future hostage situations.
Government study found flaws in voluntary census
The StatsCan study was conducted before the government announced its plan to scrap the mandatory census.
A voluntary version of the Canadian census will result in significant underreporting of minorities and other groups such as home renters, according to a June 2010 StatsCan study. The study was conducted in anticipation of the government’s plan to make the 2011 census voluntary. Despite objections from researchers and civil groups, that plan is going ahead. The survey simulated the difference between a voluntary census and the real results of the 2006 Canadian census. That census reported an 2.77 per cent increase in visible minorities, but researchers said a voluntary survey would have only reported a .74 per cent increase.
Tinseltown in the T-dot: TIFF opens
The Toronto International Film Festival begins tonight with a gala screening of a movie described as Glee on ice.
Cinephiles and celebrities alike are flocking to Toronto today for the opening of the country’s most prestigious film festival. Clint Eastwood, Werner Hertzog, and Danny Boyle are just a few of the lauded filmmakers attending the 11-day festival, which will see 300 films from 60 countries screened. Things never quite go smoothly at TIFF, and organizers have already taken some flack for their choice of the opening night film. Score: the Hockey Musical doesn’t quite embody the glitz associated with a major international film festival, but it certainly couldn’t get more Canadian. Festival director Cameron Bailey said it's "like Glee, but on a hockey rink."
Law society knew about judge’s nude photos six years ago
The Manitoba Law Society only began investigating Justice Lori Douglas last week, but knew about incriminating photos of her in 2004.
There had been rumours of judge Lori Douglas’s sexual past in the Winnipeg legal community for years, but today the Winnipeg Free Press is reporting that the province’s law society has known about compromising photos of her posted on the internet since 2004. The Manitoba Law Society requested a sealing order be placed on what it called “very sensitive” documents about Douglas in 2005 after a lawyer named Ian Histed presented them to a disciplinary committee in 2004. The existence of the photos became public last week after a former client of Douglas’s husband alleged the couple tried to induce him to have sex with her.
Questions asked after firestorm sweeps through Detroit
High winds, downed power lines and abandoned houses are being blamed for 87 fires that ravaged Detroit on Tuesday night.
Detroit residents took to the streets with garden hoses and waited up to two hours for firefighters to arrive as close to 90 fires raged across the city on Tuesday night. Emergency calls began at 3 p.m. after a windstorm knocked over power lines, and plumes of smoke covered several sections of the city. Firefighters were called in from neighbouring suburbs as crews rushed from blaze to blaze. Many Detroit neighbourhoods have a high volume of abandoned houses, which allowed flames to spread for some time before they were noticed. The fall-out of the fires continued yesterday, with many criticizing the city’s practice of deactivating up to twelve fire crews a day due to budget constraints.
EI premium increase could hurt jobs
Canadians will take a hit on their paycheques once the freeze on hikes to Employment Insurance rates ends on January 1, 2011 and.
A panel tasked with balancing the Canadian EI fund is recommending raising premiums by the maximum allowable amount in 2011, but critics are saying that could have a negative effect on the fragile Canadian job market. The EI fund is currently in the red, and starting in January the panel wants to begin skimming $1.83 off of every $100 earned, 15 cents more than the current rate. Employers would also have to pitch in an extra 21 cents per $100, and some analysts say this could prevent the creation of new jobs. The panel’s recommendations are non-binding, and can be overruled by the cabinet.
