It’s too bad. The majority of the citizens of the nation to my north seem so nice, and they managed to avoid our kind of political embarrassment, so it’s jarring to see some individuals who are total jerks.
Like Andrew Scheer.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for praising Gov. Gen. Julie Payette in the wake of Payette’s suggestion that “divine intervention” did not play a role in the creation of life on Earth.
It is extremely disappointing that the prime minister will not support Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians and other faith groups who believe there is truth in their religion,Scheer said in a statement posted to Facebook.
Respect for diversity includes respect for the diversity of religious beliefs, and Justin Trudeau has offended millions of Canadians with his comments.
Hang on there, Andy. You’ve just mentioned a bunch of groups, Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians and other faith groups
who hold mutually incompatible beliefs about the nature of the universe, and who openly express their beliefs in the public square. Do you think Christians ought to shut up about Jehovah and Jesus because it might offend those who believe in Wakan Tanka? Or is the only group you’d like to silence the atheists? Or how about those millions of Canadian atheists? Should they be offended when you pray to your nonexistent deity as part of official business?
Speaking as an atheist myself, I can disagree and find some beliefs stupid and silly without being offended, and without demanding that people’s beliefs be suppressed.
Also, here’s another Bad Canadian, Jordan Peterson. He’s personally dragging down the reputation of Canada single-handedly. His latest? He is doxxing students who organize rallies to protest his speeches, and siccing his mob of happy fascists on them.
The event, “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses,” would have featured prominent conservative speakers. The planned protest rally posed a potential threat if the two groups were to clash, and Ryerson University felt that it did not have proper security for the event. In one of his tweets, Peterson called the protest’s student organizers “communists (really).”
One of the students’ profiles is no longer publicly available on Facebook. The other student, Christeen Elizabeth, has chosen to keep hers available. She feels Peterson’s action should not be taken as a threat, but rather as validation. “When he doxxed me, he validated me,” she said. “He validated everything that I was saying.”
Elizabeth has received extensive hate mail and harassment via Facebook, some of which have bordered on death threats. “These are his fans,” said Elizabeth. “These are the people he’s pandering to. This is why I take issue.”
Oh. Those two students have managed to rescue the reputation of Canadians everywhere. Good on you, Christeen Elizabeth! Hang in there, silenced student!
Well, having lived in Canada for 73 years I am well aware that we have our share of idiots and assholes. Nothing special about us that way.
Our press is a little less complicit with giving these folks an uncritical platform, but this too has been getting worse lately with the National Broadcaster having been purposely infested with assholes by the last “Conservative” government (although the new one isn’t doing much to root them out).
But still a national political party with left wing promises (few of which they have kept or intend to implement) can still get elected here, and a couple of nominally “socialist” parties have gained power in the western provinces. So I guess the rot is a little bit slower up here. But it is certainly there if you look.
Without reading the article, “Yes.”
After reading the article, “Yes.”
Off topic ,but has the left wing uprising started in America ,has foretold by alex-cluck,ckuck glibber gibber -jones?
Scheer is obviously expressing Christians’ doubling-down on the faith after 2,000 years of no-show by Jesus. “Any day now” was good enough for two millennia but for some reason their patience has now worn thin, prompting the need for a puritanical “you better believe like we believe” Christian militancy that’s now spreading out from Amerika. Oh, Canada.
I saw for the first time yesterday a white power sticker in a car window. The Conservatives here are going full Trump, emboldened by his success in the States. Yeah, we have them here too.
Not a deity.
Really, the fact that Stephen Harper was in power for ten years tells you that Canadians should be far less smug than we tend to be.
Not to mention that most white Canadians attitudes towards the high levels of poverty and incarceration among the native population consist of a combination of ignorance and racism. Yet the US is seen as the one with race issues.
I wonder how rude so much of the world is that we somehow gained this reputation for politeness.
Anyway, we’ve also given the world Ezra Levant and the stain on humanity that is The Rebel.
And if you want to see people with lost shit, you should visit Alberta for this brief moment in time when conservatives don’t hold power for the first time in pretty much anyone’s lifetime at the provincial level. They’ve also lost it after a decade of Harper at the federal level, and both major cities in this province currently have progressive mayors. I’m used to having governments that don’t represent my values, but as it turns out, when this happens to conservatives they get very, very, very angry and who would have thought it, but conservatives aren’t nice people.
I have never understood why we Canadians have this reputation for being nice, or super progressive compared to the US, because it seems obvious to me that anyone who is paying attention in the slightest will see that we have plenty of assholes and awful people. However, my experience has been that many Americans have very shallow knowledge about Canada, even those who profess to admire various things about the country, so perhaps that explains it to some degree. Though to be honest, plenty of Canadians love to toot our own horn, spread the message of Tim Hortons, hockey, and free healthcare, while often having little knowledge of what they are talking about.
There are, apparently, also homicidal racists in Canada. The place is no utopia. It is better than the US in many regards, but that really isn’t saying much.
Yup. And that includes our police forces as well.
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/new-light-on-saskatoons-starlight-tours/
Been to Canada once, I found the people kind and polite ,all except an old guy in Toronto Airport .
Mind you i did run in to him with my trolley .
I wish you wouldn’t perpetuate the “oh Canadians are so NICE” thing. It’s wearing a little thin, especially when you turn around and do the tut-tut-tut-I’m-so-disappointed-in-you patronizing thing.
Sorry.
heh
Rob Bos:
I sympathize, because North Dakota Nice, but y’know, people could be saying much worse, so perhaps you should find something more substantial to whine about.
Excuse me for asking Caine for clarification.
Caine, my impression as an outsider, has been the Indigenous respect Matire as the creator to which we should respect by only using what we Need and leaving what we Want to remain unsullied.
Please clarify my understanding, I really am trying to understand fully.
Unfortunately, the “It’s racist if you don’t agree with religions” thing is actually something I’ve run into on my fairly liberal college campus (in the LGBT center, no less!)
The most headscratching variant I got was “It’s impossible to be a transgender atheist because being transgender is a spiritual condition, an being an atheist is transphobic because you’re denying spiritual conditions exist.”
Actually, there is a connection between the G-G’s statement and a Supreme Court of Canada decision handed down just yesterday.
A British Columbia First Nation asked that a planned ski development be stopped because it was on land sacred to them. Now, I am generally on the side of First Nations here, because they have been so royally fucked over by the Canadian governments and the RCMP. However, in this case the First Nation involved, by the news reports I have read, asked the Court to rule in their favour because their deity would by physically displaced by the development. In effect, they were asking the Supreme Court to officially recognize their deity as REAL. The Court denied their petition 7-2 on those grounds.
And I agree with that decision. The Supreme Court said explicitly that all persons can worship their own deity/principles or whatever (as long as such worship does not run afoul of the Criminal Code — i.e. human sacrifice, etc.), but that the court cannot take into account and treat as “real” any person’s self-chosen deity.
Oh, and as for Andrew Scheer; he’s the current leader of the Conservative Party, and the reason that they will not get in power while he is leader. Harper was religious fanatic as well, but he was far better at hiding it. (Stephen Harper was an abominable person, and did terrible things to Canada, but, unlike most conservatives, he was very, very smart about how he used his power and his public presentation, which is what made him so dangerous.)
Finally, speaking as a Canadian, about the “niceness” trope; there’s a lot of truth to it, and a paradoxical effect. I spoke to the black man in a black/white relationship. They had moved here from America, and I asked him about how he was treated differently in Canada. His reply, paraphrased from the conversation, was, “In America, we got the ‘hate-stare’ all time. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was predictable. In Canada, we were so welcomed, it was, and is, really great. But that makes it worse, actually, when we run into some outspoken racist. Then, because our guard is down, the bigotry is extremely shocking and upsetting.”
@18:
Matire? WTF? Indigenous people are not fucking monolith, they have different beliefs. Wakan Tanka is Lakota/Dakota/Nakota, specifically, and it does not refer to a deity. You don’t get to reduce all indigenous belief into stupid new-agey sayings a/o “ooh, quick spiritual beliefs!”
The majority of the citizens of the nation to my north seem so nice
It’s working comrades!
Andrew Scheer is a particularly nasty Christian fundamentalist with the ethics of a rabid weasel but he is good at smiling. He is a fitting successor to Steven Harper–see ethics, etc. above–and the smile is a plus. It is unclear if Harper could smile.
Scheer appears willing to do just about anything to defeat Trudeau. From an earlier association with Ezra Lavant’s Rebel and one or two of his staff, it seems likely he is also racist and islamophobic. In other words, a well-rounded personality.
I didn’t know they had prayers in the HofC. But then I have not been in the House since I was 16. I used to live in Ottawa-Hull and no local ever goes there unless they are shepherding visitors around the tourist sites.
# 6 kevinalexander
Ah sh**! Alberta?
I did see a creation museum car licence holder the other day.
That whole multiple incompatible belief systems thing was what made me an atheist. I remember thinking about it for a few weeks when I was 7 or 8 and deciding that the most likely explanation was that they were all without foundation.
Canada’s also given the world Lauren Southern, who left Rebel Media because it wasn’t racist enough for her tastes and now spends her time going to Italy to fire flare guns at refugee boats and filming herself getting frightened by the fact there are brown people in France. The only redeeming thing about her are the laughs provided when antifa douses her with fox piss.
Re @21
Thank you
And if we’re going to mention hard right Canadian women there’s also Andrea Hardie, aka Janet Bloomfield aka JudgyBitch(her self naming, not mine). Dave Futrelle has posted many times about her antics.