Having your cake and eating it too

The Grits, who think of themselves as the party of immigrants, have made certain decisions concerning party orthodoxy -many by fiat from the PMO- that were bound to have consequences come election time.

Today's Toronto Star has an article that may indicate some of those problematic issues are now bubbling to the surface:

"People are angry at the Liberals," says Sima Zerehi, who edits the English-language section of Shahrvand, a twice-weekly paper for the Iranian community.

There are many reasons why.

Among the national issues, only same-sex marriage seems to be a consistent problem for the Liberals.

People "are very unhappy with the Liberals about that," says Latafat Ali Siddiqui, editor in chief of Canadian Asian News, a monthly that serves people from Pakistan and India.

"We have extensive coverage of same-sex marriage," says Tak Lam, news editor of the Chinese daily Ming Pao. "Asians don't feel so comfortable with that."

The irony here, of course, is that this issue, like abortion and other matters of conscience, cuts across party lines. Some Liberals oppose Same-sex marriage. Some Conservatives are in favour. Nevertheless, the Liberals are now considered pro same-sex marriage, notwithstanding Martin's rhetorical gymnastics concerning the protection of the Charter of Rights (it is said that Martin, who is nearly seventy, is actually rather uncomfortable with the issue, like many of his generation).

Did it not occur to anyone in the Liberal Party that the whole Charter thing would not fly with immigrant communities? Contrary to what the politburo might think, immigrants understand the Charter -and they value it. They certainly do not wish to see it trivialized by invoking it to protect dubious "rights" that were never really in question.

Multiculturalism is founded on respect for other cultures. The Grits may soon find out that some of their client groups' cultures include a traditional (even "religious) streak and a distate for the trivialization of one of the documents they hold most dear as Canadians.

Clash of the Titans?

Juggernaut

vs.

Juggernaut

Stephen Harper Wants To Eat Your Face

Stephen Harper wants to cut all your social services and use the savings to recruit radical right-wing american hillbilly commandos from red states to come up here and set up shooting galleries on the streets of downtown Toronto --preferrably the Annex, where all them pinkos live-- and then Harper will fund American-style private healthcare clinincs where victims of these gun toting lunatics will have to sell their blood and kidneys and lengths of intestine to pay for the suturing of their bullet wounds, which they'll have to do themselves because Stephen Harper hates immigrants and won't allow foreign-trained doctors into the country unless it is to drive trucks full of toxic waste up to northern ontario, where the trucks will dump biohazardous materials from his private, republican-style healthcare clinics into abandoned mines, causing flipper-babies and other such birth defects in expectant repressed lesbian mothers who live on a single income with no spousal support because Stephen Harper wants to use the notwithstanding clause to outlaw gay marriage and force the dissolution of all gay marriages that have take place, and force those gay divorcées to campaign against abortion by creating chain gangs of gay, formerly married Canadians to rummage through abortion pails behind Morgenthaler clinics so that the radical right wing fundamentalist christian zealots who want to get their filthy paws on your oviaries will have bloody props to brandish when they have their violent demonstrations on parliament hill as a prelude to the introduction of a conservative law that outlaws a woman's right to choose and donates all those babies from the unwanted pregnancies to experimental genetic supersoldier farms run by christian fundamentalist preachers to be set up in Kanata, Ontario, designed to breed unthinking killing machines that will be used by an all-powerful department of national defence to go to other countries and impose the nefarious Bush agenda of world domination and fascist imperialism with jackboots and bazookas.

Choose your Canada, dumbass.