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Can a minority government be effective? |
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Gary Mauser
Being in Ottawa this past several months is as frustrating as having boils on your backside. You can’t sit down and you can’t stand up either.
Canadians need a government that can govern. After years of Liberal sleaze and sloth, Canadians turned to the Conservatives last year to solve real problems – problems like rising crime rates and the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately, Parliament bogged down due to squabbling and grandstanding.
In an effort to lance this boil, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has decided to prorogue Parliament. A new session means starting again with a clean slate. Harper will open Parliament with a new throne speech in October. This is a courageous step, because by doing so, he risks bringing down the government. We could see an election before Christmas.
During the past year, Harper and the Conservatives have tried to govern, but the Opposition parties have not been cooperative. Since the Conservatives do not have a majority in Parliament, they are dependent upon the support of at least one of the parties in opposition to pass legislation. Sometimes they can find a partner; often they cannot. This is a very frustrating dance because the Opposition just jockeys for political advantage.
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Bruce Allen’s ranting on the radio the other day and the aftermath certainly caught him by surprise. Maybe he thought, like in most other times, he will get away with his public musings and no one can dare challenge him. His profile portrays him as a someone who considers himself nothing less than a king and he loves to live in that aura of falsehood he has created around himself.
And he refuses to bow down! His musings certainly attracted the wrath of all immigrant communities and their leaders. Meetings were held round town, communities gathered and talked about Bruce’s courage to show the immigrants the door if they don’t fit in and once again the racism card came up. How dare he? Then on the other hand, what all communities ignored was what Gov.General Michaelle Jean was saying during the same period about “Quebec’s debate on the reasonable accommodation of religious and ethnic minorities is a healthy exercise that should take place in the rest of Canada as well.”
Talking about Quebec, a latest report by Ottawa-based SES research released last month said that only 18 per cent of Canadians say cultural and religious minorities should be totally accommodated in Canada, with 53 per cent saying immigrants should fully adapt to the Canadian way of life. The remaining respondents feel somewhere in between. “A sizeable portion of Canadians have relatively fixed view of Canada and what it is,” said SES president Nik Nanos. However part of that fixed view is a willingness to accommodate new Canadians but not at the price of compromising what Canada really is. In Quebec, the message is loud and clear. They see Canada through the lens of two founding peoples, two founding language communities and anyone who comes to Canada should fit into that framework.
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Breaking stereotypes
A recent article published in the journal Science has once again finally blasted the vastly prevalent myth-that women talk more than men. Researchers proved that while women tend to speak 16,000 words a day, men tend to speak a tiny bit less than 16,000 words a day, which of course, is not statistically significant. Researchers outfitted 396 college students — 345 Americans and 51 Mexicans — with devices that automatically recorded them every 12 1/2 minutes, which amounts to 4 percent of a person's daily utterances.
Psychologist Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona who is the author of the study claimed that the three top talkers in the study — uttering up to 47,000 words a day — were all men. So was the most taciturn subject, who spoke only 700 words a day, on average. He and his colleagues certainly were surprised by the outcome as they had bought into the stereotype that men were the quieter lot. This stereotype was further strengthened when Louann Brizendine, in her book The Female Brain, published last year proclaimed that a woman uses 20,000 words a day while a man uses only 7000. But the most important point is, till the research published by journal Science no one had ever systematically recorded the total daily output, in natural conversations, of a sizable number of people.
I was reading this article on my recent visit to downtown Vancouver in the local transit bus. Like most passengers, I try not to drive in that vastly populated dearly parking place. While reading the article at the back of the bus, I looked around and saw 4 women and 3 men along with me. The women were busy with their cell phones, not talking or anything, just maybe like playing around or like learning a few tricks. Then a ‘gentleman’ with a respectable aura, carrying an official suitcase and a big binder under his arms, came and sat near one of the men. It did not take them more than 2 seconds to start talking and the ‘respectable gentleman’ opened his suitcase and started showing the other passenger a few pictures and the topic turned to baseball.
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The Taj:Immortal Love and Beauty |
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First time in the history of the world, technology played a role in picking the new Seven Wonders of the World. While of course, it helped to save time and maybe some dough, yet it was not without much controversy. More so, as the campaign was privately sponsored by a Swiss filmmaker, an museum curator Bernard Weber, who has been accused of gaining financially after Afghnaistan’s giant Buddha statues were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
The move angered some cultural experts as it emulates the ancient seven wonders selected by intellectuals in the Mediterranean region around 200 BC. A culture specialist at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in India termed the campaign as neither democratic nor scientific. Said Nicole of UNESCO, “The winning sites will have special status and we will work with them as a group to market them, and for educational purposes. But they're not going to be the only ones eligible for support." UNESCO which takes care of almost all the heritage sites of the world declared that it has no link with the initiative and the result would be the opinions of those who have access to the Internet and not the entire world.
As many as 70 million people took part in the poll and a short list of 21 was drawn by a panel of world renowned architects and ex-UNESCO chief Federico Mayor in January, 2006. The list of 21 had included Angkor Wat temples, the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Kiyomizu Temple in Japan, the Kremlin and Red Square, Neuschwanstein Castle in southern Germany, New York's Statue of Liberty, the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, Sydney Opera House and the ancient city of Timbuktu in Mali. Later, China’s Academy of the Great Wall encouraged Chinese voters to vote at the website as it had missed the opportunity 2000 years ago when the Greeks named Seven Wonders of the World, which ultimately made it to the 10 frontrunners of the 21 short-listed sites. .
As the results started pouring in last month in Portugal’s capital, Indians were celebrating. New list of Seven Wonders of the World features Taj Mahal (India), Great Wall of China (China), Petra (Jordan), Christ the Redeemer (Brazil), Chichen Itza Pyramid (Mexico) and Colosseum (Italy) and Machu Picchu (Peru). The most critical country, however, has been Egypt, which houses the only remaining ancient world wonders and where officials described Weber's project as unscientific and "absurd." The New Seven Wonders Foundation finally removed the Giza pyramid from the list of candidates, giving it a special status as an honorary world wonder. |
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Community faces the brunt
It is ironical that just as 15,000 Ismaili Muslims were getting ready to commemorate the Aga Khan's 50 years of leadership last month, the community was jolted with the sad news of Shemina Hirji’s murder. A report by Dr. Neelam Verma
Widely regarded as a peace loving community, the Ismaili Muslim community gathered to mourn the loss of newly wed Shamina, an elementary school principal in Surrey who had got married to an Indo-Canadian just the week before, leaving many questions unanswered and at the same time once again became the focus of mainstream media to violence against women in the community.
While the police are still investigating and the fact that Shemina’s killing was a result of domestic violence is yet to be proved, the Indo-Canadian community once again is in the front pages of mainstream newspapers and making headlines in news telecasts. Reporters went back into the history of Shemina’s husband Narinder Pal Cheema and unearthed his violent past, thus once again highlighting the issue of violence against women as a common occurrence. Did the media do the same when Bradley John Benham killed his wife Lisa Cubin in 2005? Or when Donna Chisholm's was reportedly killed by her boyfriend in 2004? There are numerous examples to quote.
Undoubtedly, the mainstream media tucks away family violence abuse among other communities in their “B”sections or inside pages, any such incident remotely connected with the Indo-Canadian community is the lead story of the day with blown over pictures. It cannot be ignored that spousal violence has always been a cause for concern in Canada. A report released last year by the Department of Justice, Canada highlighted that spousal abuse has enormous economic implications for Canadian society. The first research study to estimate the costs of various forms of violence against women, including woman abuse in intimate relationships, found that this problem costs Canadian society an estimated $4.2 billion per year in social services, education, criminal justice, labour, employment, health and medical costs. Criminal justice costs alone total an estimated $871,908,583.00 per year. Of course, these are figures for the country, yet just one community cannot rake up this amount alone.
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Polls
Editorial
Booming India deters future immigrants Every time I go to India, I come back impressed at the developments taking place in the world’s largest democracy. Economists predict that India will overtake Britain and have the world’s fifth largest economy within a decade. Read More
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