Guys, we're not removing your right to protest. We're just removing your right to protest when it matters.

Via CBC:

A proposed B.C. law would allow municipal officials to enter homes to seize unauthorized and possibly anti-Olympic signs on short notice, civil libertarians say.

Violators could be fined up to $10,000 a day and jailed up to six months, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said Friday.

The proposed law was introduced Thursday as a bill to amend the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act.

A new poll finds Canadians overwhelmingly love their health care and oppose the Canadian Medical Association's proposal to privatize their health care system:

New poll shows Canadians overwhelmingly support public health care  

Group says advocates of private system are out of touch with most Canadians

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Aug. 12, 2009

Contact:
Michael McBane, national coordinator, Canadian Health Coalition, (613) 277-6295, www.medicare.ca

To all those Americans who wish they had the benefits or protection of Canadian citizenship, well, the value of the above has dropped like a stone in recent history, and none so obviously as with the current absurd Abousfian Abdelrazik episode. The poor man has a family in Canada, is a Canadian citizen by refugee asylum, and has been stuck in a Kafkaesque multiyear nightmare starting with imprisonment and torture by the Sudanese government, and ending with his residence at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, which will not offer him a passport to return to Canada.

I do recall, lo, that here among us there were people who hoped that Canada would arrest George Bush or something. Well, not only did they not do that, but they've just prohibited another George from speaking in Toronto: maverick British MP George Galloway.

More specifically, Alykhan Velshi, an aide to the execrable minister Jason Kenney, quoth trollishly:

That is a fact. Now, you may ask "why is this important?"

Leading up to a 2004 visit to Vancouver, Canada, lawyers there sought to have him charged for his criminal behavior resulting in a court decision that reflected the Canadian Attorney General's view that Bush could not be brought up on torture charges at that time because he had diplomatic immunity:

“These charges were properly laid and backed up by powerful evidence. The government didn’t deny that evidence because it couldn’t deny it. Diplomatic immunity is purely procedural. It doesn’t affect the validity of the charges, only whether they can be proceeded with, for the time being, in a foreign court, in this case a Canadian court. Even if Bush has immunity, it’s only temporary and it won’t shield him or anyone in his administration from Canadian law, or any other law, when they leave office. That the Canadian government would try to hush this up by hiding Bush behind diplomatic immunity was only to be expected. Paul Martin invited Bush here to ingratiate himself with the President, despite the President’s crimes against our laws and against international law, despite even his inadmissibility as a war criminal under Canada’s immigration laws – above all, despite the unending human disaster the President’s ‘war of choice’ has brought to the people of Iraq.”

Cut back to 2009, as Bush makes plans to deliver a speech in Calgary, Canada, and this time?  Read more…

Mike Dennison: How did reform happen elsewhere?

And finally, in Canada, its system of government health insurance for all started in one corner of one province — Saskatchewan — in the mid-1940s and slowly spread across that province and then the country as citizens saw how it worked. It didn't become fully established everywhere until the mid-1960s.

Which brings us back to America, 2009, and our own health-care path. ...

...Why would we keep health insurance tied to employment? Almost nobody likes it.

Read the whole thing. Post it on your blog and any community blog you frequent. Blogwhore in the comments. Send it to your friends.

Here is a list of others who shut down parliament when it didn't agree with them:

1629 King Charles I in England
1799 Napoleon in France
1913: Victoriano Huerta in Mexico
1933: Adolf Hitler in Germany
1936 Fransisco Franco in Spain
1939: Benito Mussolini in Italy
1973: Augusto Pinochet in Chile
2008: Steven Harper in Canada

Precedent setting. pfffffffft

I was going to do a knitting post, but I have decided to prorogue it for the time being.

Here are the five parties with seats in the Canadian House of Commons. I'm including the Green Party because they technically got one shortly before the election due to "crossing the floor" (an MP declared his affiliation with them but was elected under another platform).

• Bloc Québecois


• Conservative Party --- incumbent minority government


• Green Party


• Liberal Party --- incumbent official opposition
  
• New Democratic Party

Today, when most of you get to work, the Canadian polls will open. Aux urnes! as they say in French. So, I've been in Canada for the past week or so, and I had grand plans of not only finishing off some posts which I owe some people, but writing a sort of last-days political travelogue of the Canadian election, as I've been wandering around southern and eastern Ontario. But not least due to the surprising spottiness of Internet access, I have failed. *hangs head*

Avoiding a double disaster

Elections are underway in Canada and the United States, and health care is not high on the political agenda in either country. Yet health care reform could emerge as an important issue following the American presidential vote. A victory for Barack Obama will encourage fans of single-payer health insurance because the Democrats have a majority in Congress and a history of supporting Canadian-style health reforms.

I love the smell of conservative fear.

The Fraser Institute: Canada and U.S. Should Look to Switzerland, Netherlands as Models for Health Care Reform

TORONTO, ONTARIO, Sep 30, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- Canada's single-payer health insurance monopoly is failing and policy makers across North America should look to other models, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, if they want to provide universal coverage, concludes a new study from independent research organization the Fraser Institute.

Debate over its future lingers in background as two-tier system gains appeal among patients

Queen's Park Bureau

It was an icy Feb. 3 when Graham Martin slipped and fell hard on his elbow, jamming his arm up into his shoulder and painfully tearing a tendon and shoulder muscles.

Martin, a police officer, was feeding the horses at his country home overlooking Sturgeon Lake near Fenelon Falls when the accident happened.

The nagging injury has pushed the 55-year-old – who might not get surgery until he's 57 – squarely into the debate about Canada's medicare system.

US bloggers still bandy about the idea that they'll run away to Canada if things get worse in the USA. This week, it appears that this is less justified than ever.

Despite campaign gaffes, the Conservative Party is still on the train to a majority government in Canada. Thus saith Nik Nanos, who is apparently the most trusted Canadian pollster. They are at 40% in the polls with a 15% gap between them and the Liberal Party. Another couple of points, and assuming that the poll results would hold at the ballot box, and they would have more than half the seats in the Canadian House of Commons, and full control of the levers of government.

So why is the Liberal Party doing so badly?

Another video from the Canadian election whose overall lesson is quite applicable to the American situation. Rick Mercer is the host of the CBC comedy Monday Report, which is a weekly Daily Show-type thing. Mercer is a very popular comedian in Canada, but IMO he became less funny when he left the endlessly hilarious This Hour Has 22 Minutes team. This video is from several months ago:

My favorite political ad of the past ten years is actually this ad/campaign theme song music video of the sovereigntist Bloc Québecois in the 2004 Canadian election:  Read more…

So the first polls of the Canadian campaign are out, and despite a number of gaffes, the Harper neocons are gaining ground, apparently with some warm, fluffy advertising. They've been gaining ground among women, who have been a particularly difficult constituency to crack, gaining ground despite a known tendency of some of their members for...fetal rights activism, which is never popular in Canada.

So, I've been wracking my brains attempting to come up with a way to introduce what the issues are in this Canadian election, including calling up family currently living in Canada and asking them, but I still haven't found the right approach. I mean, not only am I writing for a USAmerican audience, which means a different national context, but I do believe that for a country so small in population compared to the USA, the politics are much harder to describe.

Perhaps this isn't fair, but I have an easier time discussing US politics with Canadians than Canadian politics with Canadians. Maybe it's just easier to paper over the real complexity in US politics, but I really do feel that Canadian politics are just more convoluted.

So now that, due to my loose fingers and Corrente's illiberal policy towards the back button, you will not see my post on Canadian vice-Queens and their electoral meaning, I will salvage my pride with a short post on what just happened on the Canadian electoral front. ie, an election was recently called.

...as we say in Canada.

So, in other words, us Canadians will have voted in a new government before you USians have voted in yours.

The stakes are high. Canadians have to decide whether they can get over Stéphane Dion's personality issues enough to stop Stephen Harper from dismantling the country, basically. So far, the most likely outcome in my opinion is that Canada will have another Conservative minority. But I'm terrified of the fact that they are in majority territory.

Via hippachria: 10 Myths About Canadian Health Care, Busted

9. People won't be responsible for their own health if they're not being forced to pay for the consequences.

Ian wonders of it would make good Canadian policy to more aggresively recruit Americans who are feeli