statism watch

Canwest News
March 17, 2009

OTTAWA — The RCMP officer who led the national-security unit that provided false information on Maher Arar to U.S. authorities has been promoted to the rank of assistant commissioner.

Michel Cabana was the inspector in charge of Project A-O Canada, a unit created in 2001 to investigate the alleged links of Abdullah Almalki to al-Qaeda. According to a report by Justice Dennis O’Connor, who oversaw a public inquiry into the matter, the RCMP team supplied information to U.S. Customs officials describing Arar as an “Islamic extremist” with links to al-Qaeda.

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Alexander Panetta, Canadian Press
March 17, 2009

OTTAWA–The Harper government is slashing nearly half the funding for the watchdog agency that monitors the RCMP and recently helped pressure the national police to craft a new policy on Tasers.

The RCMP Public Complaints Commission is warning that a potential 40 per cent plunge in its budget would force it to shut down the division that spurred the Taser review.

The commission says the cutback would jeopardize research about how police deal with mentally ill suspects, and how police forces conduct investigations into their own officers.

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Not that taxation is good, but one could hardly paint Barclays as a tax crusader. This is done with criminal intent.

The Guardian
March 17, 2009

Injunction forces news website to remove seven leaked memos showing how bank avoided hundreds of millions of pounds in tax

Barclays Bank obtained a court order early today banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax.

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Asher Moses, The Age
March 17, 2009

Vito Pilieci, Ottawa Citizen
March 17, 2009

OTTAWA — A court case in British Columbia has the potential to drastically change the Canadian Internet landscape by making search engines such as Google and Yahoo illegal.

A case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) by a small search engine for BitTorrent files, called ISOHunt Web Technologies Inc., is raising questions about whether search engines are liable for the sharing of copyright-protected content online.

The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is, if a site like ISOHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law?

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Is water a ‘right’? This is a vital issue, but one must not succumb to the sort of vague, emotionalist approach that expands the concept of ‘right’ beyond all recognition. This journal holds that rights are not guarantees to goods – there is no ‘right’ to education, transport, health care, if that means it comes at someone else’s expense and at the expense of their rights. A right, philosophically, is the link between 1) the objective moral code of a human being as derived from natural law, and 2) the political laws of a society. The fundamental individual right is the right to life, which has the derivative and necessary rights of liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness which allows one to act for one’s own sake, to create the material means of one’s survival, and to live for one’s own sake, the right to be governed by the motivation of one’s own welfare.

So the question at hand, then, is can water be property? It would seem to depend on the circumstance. Certainly a pond on one’s ranch would seem to be one’s property, there for one’s use so long as it does not evaporate away during a drought. But free running water, the section of a stream running past one’s garden, for example? Perhaps, like the atmosphere, it is a naturally shared resource and one should be prevented from removing more than one requires for one’s individual use. There are indications to think Maude Barlow is right, since without water there is no life. One thing seems certain: water is not something that the criminal IMF and World Bank should be able to come into a country and give away to its corporate hangers-on.

CBC News
March 17, 2009

Maude Barlow slams Canadian position on people’s right to water

Canada should be denied a seat on the UN Security Council until it recognizes water as a human right, a Canadian adviser to the president of the General Assembly said Tuesday.

“It would be wonderful to see Canada on the [council] helping to address the critical global challenges of our day,” Maude Barlow, who is also chairwoman of the nationalist Council of Canadians, said in a statement.

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