Burqa...to ban or to tolerate?

The burqa, that symbol of Islamic female dress, covers the face, leaving barely a netted opening for the eyes.
Is it acceptable for Islamic women to wear such attire?
In France, there is a law forbidding it.
In England, the wife of former British Prime Minster, Tony Blair, Cherrie Booth, acted as solicitor for a woman pressing her case for continuing to wear it. She was successful.
In Quebec, there is much discussion, with the general public opinion leaning towards rejection.
In Ontario, the matter is still undecided, although there seems to have been more energy behind the push for Sharia Law in domestic disputes, an issue the Ontario Government has rejected.
How to deal with different minority groups in a pluralistic society?
For the last twenty-plus years, the "left" seems to have been the political support for minority groups such as gays, lesbians, racial minorities, and in the U.S., immigrant groups, espcially Latinos.
The "right" favours the "rights of the individual, and prefers not to be swamped by a tidal wave of "pandering to minorities."
Political correctness, including the abhorrent fear of offending a newcomer, motivates some to declare support for clothing such as the Burka. The R.C.M.P. a few years ago, acceeded to a request from a Sikh member to permit him to wear his native head-dress, rather than the "issue" uniform head-dress.
Extending an authentic welcome to new immigrants is an important gesture of friendship; on the other hand, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" has been a long-standing aphorism that has guided social policy in official language debates.
It is the delicate balance between permitting the appropriate expression(s) of immigrant culture while preserving the traditions that define Canada, that we would seek. This is being written on the southern border of Canada, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario/St. Lawrence River.
Since the treatment of women is so radically different in Canada from the countries of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, perhaps it would be supportive of women from those countries to ban the burka, thereby creating a fresh starting point for those families, upon their entry into this country.
Is it likely that the Federal government will even debate such an issue?
Is it more likely that, depending on the decisions of the provincial governments, an individual who disagrees with a provincial law, (either banning or permitting) will petition the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court?
And in that venue, is it likely that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be the guiding and operative statue, leaving the justices to research and to debate and to rule on whether or not a person's religious freedom is violated, for example, if the burka were to be banned?
As the world shrinks, and people from all countries move to visit and live in other countries, perhaps an international code might emerge from the United Nations, guiding individual nations on the level of openness, acceptance and tolerance for different costume traditions.
Personally, I would prefer that Islamic women not wear the burqa, given the history of oppression which has accompanied its wearing. And I would also prefer that the provinces, and the federal government not create a statute on the subject. And I would also prefer that Islamic young men not wear any piece of metal on their leg, that could and might be used as a weapon, simply because our culture is not prepared to deal with such potential incidents.
There is, after all, some obligation on the part of the newcomer to "adapt" to Canadian customs, without having to discard the essence(s) of their own traditions, and to celebrate the religions freedoms and legal rights which they receive upon becoming citizens of Canada. It seems that that tradition is not threatened by the voluntary removal of the burqa.

Injustices in the justice system...how are we doing?

Each day, the city, provincial and Mounted police encounter hundreds or perhaps thousands of people in the course of their duties. And each day, most of these encounters are measured, thoughtful, civil and for the most part, sensitive to many factors that most of the rest of us would not even think about.
However, it is those exceptions to the norm that are disturbing.
Yesterday, I read, in the Toronto Star, two different and unconnected stories about the justice system, one about police intervention and the other about the legacy of poor judgement and a criminal record that disturbed me.
The first involved two young men, approximately twenty, who were returning home after completing a job cutting the lawn of a client in Brampton. They were pushing a power mower and carrying the other items like weed-cutter and oil and they were greeted by a city police officer, riding in his car, who asked them where they had stolen their equipment. The "owner" of the business informed the officer that the equipment belonged to his father, gave the address and even the address of the client, to demonstrate the veracity of his story. Not only did the officer confiscate the equipment, he also informed the client that the job had been performed with "stolen" equipment. The father of the 'owner' had to beg for the equipment to be returned. A footnote to the story, the employee is a young man who is a victim of tourets syndrome.
There is now a law suit against the police officer, filed by the 'owner' of the lancscaping business and his father.
The other story was a first-person account of a man, educated as a teacher, who, during his formative years, broke into a doctor's office and stole some prescription drugs to feed a drug habit which he has since kicked. However, having spent time in jail, convicted of a crime, he is now banned, for life, from teaching in Ontario schools. His legitimate question: When do I stop paying for the crime I committed? And his sad answer, "It seems never."
Individual indiscretion, on the part of the police officer is one form of injustice, and presumably the courts can and will hear the full story, and make a judgement about the series of incidents and actions and even motives that comprise the story. Did the young man with tourets syndrome perhaps prompt the intervention? Was the officer a little over-bearing in his approach, exercising excessive power for his own needs? I trust the justice system to right this apparent wrong.
In the second case, however, I believe Hell will have frozen over before the Ontario education system will permit a person with a criminal record from obtaining, first, a teaching certificate, including membership in the Ontario College of Teachers, and second, a position in an Ontario classroom.
And this merely expresses the body politic's excessive fear, and refusal to re-think the notion that a convicted criminal, once having paid his "sentence," is free of the implications of his mis-deed(s). There may be a few individuals and groups like the John Howard Society that provide some guidance and assistance to individuals attempting re-entry after a conviction. However, this drama goes mostly under the radar of public scrutiny and concern.
If the Brampton incident were to become more frequent, perhaps, then, the public would become sufficiently alarmed and demand some changes both to police training and deportment, and to the employer's right to restrict those who have served their time from legitimately performing the functions of their professional training and education.
Imagine the potential of the teacher being able to guide others away from the kind of mistakes he has made and paid for, dearly, if he were permitted, albeit on probation for a stated period of time, and under careful monitoring, to teach in an Ontario school.
Keeping him "ostracised" from the profession says more about the system's addiction to perfection and purity than it does about the person in question. And that says it is not a public education system quite yet.

Kingston Whig failing in marketing and in journalism

Marketing 101...
Just received a phone call from MacInnis Marketing of Halifax, attempting to sell me a "special" subscription to the Kingston Whig Standard.
Nothing news worthy about such a call, except:
they were unaware that I had previously subscribed, and had cancelled because of the pitiful coverage of Kingston's City Hall, its issues, its politicians and its editorials.
Living in Kingston, one quickly learns that only "old stones" have any significance or meaning, unless one happens to be a university professor, a Queen's graduate, or a well-to-do corporate giant, or just perhaps a military 'brass'. This is a town that status and insiders and seniority have built, and if it were rated on its receptivity to new people, ideas and possibilities, it would not receive a passing grade. The retiring mayor, has, somehow, forged enough votes for new arenas, pools and some infrastructure, with barely a ripple noticeable in a change in attitudes.
The coverage of city hall, legitimately dubbed coverage by the wannabe's of the "old stones" leaves the newcomers wondering...
is this another case of the "old boys" covering the "old boys" like a private club?
*who is in (political) bed with whom,
*why in council meetings there is so much attention to procedure and so little focus on the merits of the issues under consideration,
*why there is so much community "talk" about conflict of interest, without proof of its reality or fiction
*why there is such apathy about municipal issues, except, of course, the size of the next tax increase
*why the personalities of the councillors and the mayor do not constitue some of the coverage
*why there is not a municipal "desk" that is eager and intense about its pursuit of real news, and not just a re-editing of the latest press release,
*why the city of Kingston isn't being held acountable for more than its active PR campaign to be the "green" city of Canada, when every year it pours hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the St.Lawrence River because of sewer back-ups.
Marketers, when they make phone calls, from out of province, for a national chain of newspapers, and are not familiar with the "account" and the reasons for its termination, (and inform the recipient of the call, "Oh, we do take comments!" after I suggested that I thought Marketing was a two-way street and after she protested two or three times that "we are only marketing the special offer",) do not engender interest in the publication by which they have been hired.
Now I have confidence neither in the marketing company nor in the newspaper itself.
Is this a typical Canadian newspaper's new way of operating?

Canada renegs on nuclear reactor promise...lives in danger!

Radioactive Iodine I-131 (also called Radioiodine I-131) therapy is a treatment for an overactive thyroid, a condition called hyperthyroidism. Hyperthyroidism can be caused by Graves' disease, in which the entire thyroid gland is overactive, or by nodules within the gland which are locally overactive in producing too much thyroid hormone.
Nuclear medicine is a branch of medical imaging that uses small amounts of radioactive material to diagnose or treat a variety of diseases, including many types of cancers, heart disease and certain other abnormalities within the body.
The thyroid is a gland in the neck that produces two hormones that regulate all aspects of the body's metabolism, the chemical process of converting food into energy. When a thyroid gland is overactive, it produces too much of these hormones, accelerating the metabolism.
Radioactive iodine (I-131), an isotope of iodine that emits radiation, is used for medical purposes. When a small dose of I-131 is swallowed, it is absorbed into the bloodstream in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and concentrated from the blood by the thyroid gland, where it begins destroying the gland's cells.
Radioactive iodine I-131 may also be used to treat thyroid cancer.
From RadiologyInfo.org, June 8, 2010

I owe my life and health to the 9 milicuries of I-131 (radioactive iodine isotope) that I took in pill form in May of 1978. The pill came in a thick metal box inside another think metal box and the radiologist used tweezers to remove it from the box and place it on my tongue, and then he gave me a drink of water, told me to swallow and to go home and lie down for a while.
Three months earlier, I had been hospitalized with a heart rate of 124 bpm, and I had lost 25 pounds in less than two weeks. The propathiauracil I had taken in the meantime, not a curative, had not worked.
Now I learn from the Toronto Star, (Joanna Smith, June 8, 2010) that the supply of radioactive isotopes is threatened because the Canadian government:
1)pulled the plug on the National Research Universal Reactor in 2008 because of cost overruns and technical difficulties and
2) has failed to honour a commitment to ensure a steady supply of medical isotopes by replacing the reactor at Chalk River, Ont. with two new reactors. The government has said it has no long-term plans to produce medical isotopes for the world market
The Society of Nuclear Medicine's Past President, Dr.Robert Atcher said at the society's conference in Utah this week, "We took that promise at face value, stopped development in the U.S. and waited....Unfortunately, our friends to the north failed to deliver on that promise and cancelled the project two years ago, which has put the whole molecular imaging community in the U.S. in a terrible bind. So let's call it like it is and say that Canada assured us that there would be a long-term solution and Canada needs to deliver on those assurances."

A heavy water leak was discovered at the reactor in May 2009, leading to the closure.
There is so subtle way to say this:
Memo to Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis:
Build the damn reactors as your government said you would!

Faux lake, security, chair and results... for world leaders

A faux lake, in imitation of Muskoka, in the Toronto Convention Centre, for the G-20 leaders..a faux spruce-up of a lake steamer at $400K not to be finished until after the conference..a fortress-like security blanket penetrable by the most imaginative and most intent of the jihadists if they chose, and most tragically, a "faux communique" already written and released long before the event itself...
And all this from the Harper Chairmanship of what is fast becoming an ardevark of geo-politics, the G-whatever.
The politics of avoidance permits Harper to skate past any real criticism: over his "don't go green" approach to climate change,
and his do-nothing approach on ending/reducing global poverty,
and his "faux" superiority in blocking a bank tax to create a fund for any future bank "transgressions" generated from the banks themselves, not from the taxpayer,
and his overt/covert refusal to fund abortions as part of the aid program to the third world...significantly limiting maternal health options
Makes one think it is not only a faux lake, but a faux chair that is going to hold the gavel on behalf of Canadians!
Avoidance of controversy is no longer acceptable in either the national or the geo-political arena.
We want and need leaders to "get positive results" from their meetings..not travel photo ops and reflective puddles for $2million.
Restraint in spending does not have to include as a pre-requisite, restraint in imagination, brain-power or courage.
Apparently, I missed something in leadership 101 when I was class president in university, and we were expected to accomplish real projects, on budget and on time! And we did!

U.S.Hubris vs. America's parched throat

An excerpt from the conclusion of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, forthcoming by Peter Beinart, about learning from American history that America can live safely and profitably in the world without dominating it.

What America needs today is a jubilant undertaker, someone—like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—who can bury the hubris of the past while convincing Americans that we are witnessing a wedding, not a funeral. The hubris of dominance, like the hubris of reason and the hubris of toughness before it, has crashed against reality’s shoals. Woodrow Wilson could not make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans. Lyndon Johnson could not halt every communist advance. And we cannot make ourselves master of every important region on earth. We have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot bear, and our adversaries have learned it too. We must ruthlessly accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is not putty in our hands.

Franklin Roosevelt did not wage World War II so America could be the world’s sole superpower, or even Europe’s.

For starters, that means remembering that we did not always believe we needed to dominate the world in order to live safely and profitably in it. In the decade and a half after the Soviet empire fell, dominance came so easily that we began to see it as the normal order of things. We expanded NATO into East Germany, then into Eastern Europe, then onto former Soviet soil, while at the same time encircling Russia with military bases in a host of Central Asian countries that once flew the Hammer and Sickle. We established a virtual Monroe Doctrine in the Middle East, shutting out all outside military powers, and the Bush administration set about enforcing a Roosevelt Corollary too, granting itself the right to take down unfriendly local regimes. In East Asia, we waited expectantly for China to democratize or implode, and thus follow Russia down the path to ideological and strategic submission. And we stopped thinking about Latin America much at all since we took it as a virtual fact of nature that no foreign power would ever again interfere in our backyard.

Living in the North American "bed" beside the global Leviathan that is the U.S. has never been easy. Canadians have written that when America gets a cold, we catch it. Canada is not only a geographic "siamese" joined at the 49th parallel; we have a history of documented "rhythms" dependent on the U.S. response to our policy.
Mutual wars, reciprocity in trade, fossil energy, and soon...water.
When America gets just a little more thirsty from the drying up of some of her endangered sources of water (The Colorado River is the latest river to be placed on the endangered rivers list!) she will come to Canada for her "life-drink," water.
While we have only 3% of the world's fresh water, that is like a gallon to a man dying of thirst. And America's hubris, and her history of dominance will still enter the room with Canadian negotiators when they come to "buy" our most precious natural resource.
And the question hanging in the atmosphere above those meetings is, "Will Canada sell off, in favour of a quick jump in our balance of payments account, the nation's fresh water?
It is and has been for more than a single year, the cause of the Council of Canadians, led by Maude Barlow, to get Canadians to support a policy that, like air, water is a human right. We heartily endorse such a policy.
However, to the Americans, every thing is another commodity, including, by the way, human DNA for which they are now issuing patents to private and also to not-for-profit companies. Everything is FOR SALE in America.
And with bottled water, or potentially another huge pipeline sucking the Great Lakes ever dryer to fed the thirst of the southwest U.S., Canadians will have to make a decision that is in the best interest of all Canadians....
And, as citizens both of the country and the world, that seems to fall nicely into the "NOT FOR SALE" file, for many Canadians including this one.
One has to wonder just how humble the Americans will be when those inevitable meetings take place. And, at the same time, one has to wonder just how "global, ethical, visionary and assertive" the Canadians sitting at the table will be.

Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft...still in tension

Gemeinschaft versus Gessellschaft...the two German words that help to define a cultural shift from the small intimate community (Gemeinschaft) of 25-200 people where everyone knows everyone else, where the conduct between people is just that, conduct and contact between real people, usually over the fence, or over a coffee or over a brew...certainly not in the courts, and usually not requiring police or "the community" to make the final decision...
to Gessellschaft, where the numbers are much larger, and the relationships are governed by contract, whether between individuals or between groups, or between an individual and a group. Here the terms, rules, conditions, are abstract, impersonal, and enforced across the community by officials "under contract" for that very function.
There are advantages to each; however, the gains to the second are certainly offset by the significant loss of identity, individualism, eccentricity, and a sense of significance for the individual.
Perhaps, when Neil Diamond's song "I am, I said" reached the airwaves, the "western" culture had already passed far beyond the first stage, leaving the existential cry...where "no one heard, not even the chair"...
And when Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" waved across the radio, the dance floor and the record shop, the same theme was re-incarnated...with "people listening without hearing," and the "words of the prophets are written on the tenement walls" in a valiant attempt to seek and to find meaning in a cultural wasteland...
"I spit out all the butt ends of my days"...and
"in the room the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo"...from the poet's poet, T. S. Eliot...
And there was W.H. Auden's "Unknown Citizen" written as an obituary, complete with social number, and case notes "when there was peace, he was for peace, and where there was war, he went"..."should anything have been wrong, we certainly should have heard"....
and the literature captures much of the last hundred years in North America and perhaps in Europe, especially in Great Britain, where life is far more public than private...and where public "persona" (mask) is the needed face that everyone puts on to meet the faces that we meet...
Is there any hope that this loss of uniqueness, paralleling a loss of authenticity, and generating a "manufactured ethic" of right and wrong that clearly contravenes the unique circumstances in which the "act" occurred can be overturned with the migration in all directions of people from all lands, especially from small, intimate communities...or will it result in a geo-mosaic of ghetto's?