Liberal MP Mario Silva argues against Catholic public schools

At least that's the way I interpret this:

...institutionalized religious discrimination cannot be condoned or tolerated in this day and age.

Discriminatory practices, whether they are directed at Roman Catholics or anyone else, are simply incompatible with any nation that ascribes to itself the fundamental values of equality that we hold in such high regard.

Dalton warned us about this

Is this what Dalton McGuinty warned us about in the last election?

The hands of students in Fareena Masood's Grade 3 class fly into the air when the teacher asks for the number of syllables in "communication."

The question stumps a few of the young students at the Islamic Foundation School -- "Is it four?" one asks -- before another student correctly answers five.

As Masood -- called Sister Fareena by her students -- writes the answer on the blackboard, one boy whispers an excited "yes" as he checks his own page.

Next on the teacher's list, written in chalk on the blackboard, are the words "wonderful" and "school."

They're fitting words for a vocabulary lesson at the Scarborough private school which is one of 25 schools ranked first in the province by the 2008 Fraser Institute report card on elementary education. The school, which has 497 male and female students from JK to Grade 12, earned a perfect 10 score, according to the report.

It seems to me they are doing something right.

Congratulations kid!

My daughter was recently accepted into the Grade 9 arts program at two of Toronto's top high schools of the arts. While I have never doubted her talent, it is certainly gratifying that others see it too.

Congratulations kid!

A lesson for tax and spend liberals

Hell, the Conservative Party might learn something too.

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute explains the relationship between tax rates, government revenues and economic growth:



via Café Hayek

Eric Lindros rehabilitates his reputation

I always thought Eric Lindros was a jerk. I never gave him a second chance after he dissed my hometown when he refused to play for the Soo Greyhounds because he thought he couldn't get a good education in Sault Ste. Marie.

Funny, the schools seemed good enough for Wayne Gretzky, who actually went to my high school. For the most part, the quality of the schools would have been the least of Lindros' problems since from my recollections the players were hardly ever in class.

In retrospect, my high school was probably the exception. It was a good public high school. In general, however, the schools in Sault Ste. Marie suck, falling well below provincial averages. Lindros had a point, even if I did not want to listen to it at the time.

Lindros also partly rehabilitates my opinion of him with this announcement:

Lindros saved one of his biggest assists for last, announcing that he's donating $5 million in support of the London Health Sciences Foundation, which includes the Fowler Kennedy Sport Medicine Clinic.

Dr. Peter Fowler, who was being honoured along with Lindros at a dinner last night, treated the hockey star throughout his career and became a good friend and mentor.

Cliff Nordal, president and CEO of London Health Sciences Centre, said he'd done some research and believes it's the single largest donation ever by a Canadian athlete.

Even for a star hockey player, that's real money. But if Lindros really wanted to make amends to the people of Sault Ste. Marie, he should have also considered donating money to their schools.

Let's raise taxes for Jews and Muslims

What if a political party proposed to raise taxes for Jews and Muslims? The public reaction would surely be one of outrage. And I am pretty sure that outrage would not be limited to Jews and Muslims. Even those of us who might pay less taxes as a result of Jews and Muslims paying more would find the idea unacceptable, if not morally repugnant.

So tell me, what is the difference between a policy that would give preferential tax treatment to some religious groups and current education policy in Ontario? With a straight face, Dalton McGuinty rails against John Tory's proposal to equally fund faith-based schools of all religious denominations, yet defends the current system where Catholic schools are publicly funded and the schools of Jews, Muslims, Anglicans and Hindus are not. Parents of other faiths who desire faith-based schooling for their children too must pay thousands of dollars in tuition per child per year, while their tax dollars fund the schooling of children in Catholic schools.

There are two ways to go here: one, end all funding to Catholic schools and convert existing separate school boards into non-denominational boards, or two, equally fund all faith-based schools.

To defend the status quo is simply out of step with the values of our "multicultural" society. If the constitution is an obstacle to implementing fairness in education policy, then we should change the constitution. It is simply intolerant to champion the discriminatory treatment of other religious groups.

Shame on Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario Liberal Party.

My question for Dalton McGuinty

The CBC invites us to submit our questions for the Ontario leaders to be asked in the leaders debate on September 20th. Here's what I submitted:

Mr. McGuinty, you appear to have taken a very principled stand against public funding of faith-based education in Ontario. Does that mean you are advocating a single, secular public education system? And if so, will you be proposing a constitutional amendment to establish non-denominational school boards in Ontario, similar to what was done in Quebec?

I would be very curious as to how he might reconcile the inconsistencies of his position with his own faith-based public education and that of his wife and kids.

McGuinty opens door to constitutional change

There is no other way to interpret this:

"If you want the kind of Ontario where we invite children of different faiths to leave the publicly funded system and become sequestered and segregated in their own private schools, then they should vote for Mr. Tory."

"If they think it's important that we continue to bring our kids together so that they grow together and learn from one another, then you should vote for me."

But it might be a good idea to take it up with his wife first:

Some proponents of change, however, disagree with the Premier's position. Mr. McGuinty, his wife, Terri, and the couple's four children all attended Catholic schools. Ms. McGuinty continues to teach part time in the Catholic system. York University professor Eric Lawee said he sees "tremendous hypocrisy" in Mr. McGuinty's opposition to extending funding to religious schools.

Not enough MBAs

Yeah right.

This is what's known as talking your book:

Canada is experiencing a serious gap in management talent that is a major contributing factor in its lagging prosperity compared with the United States, says a new study co-written by one of the country's leading business school deans.

The study, produced by Ontario's Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity and co-written by University of Toronto management dean Roger Martin, says Canada is placing undue emphasis on science and technology talent, while neglecting management skills that are in short supply.

[...]

One shortfall is the lack of MBAs at the top of major Canadian companies, the report says. Figures for 2004 show that 37 per cent of CEOs for the 100 largest U.S. companies had MBAs, compared with 24 per cent of CEOs for the 100 largest Canadian companies.

To that, all I can ask is what if Bill Gates got an MBA instead of starting Microsoft?

Justin Trudeau is right about segregated schools

The National Post takes Justin Trudeau to task for his recent criticism of segregated schools, suggesting he read the charter of rights.

...Justin Trudeau's Friday outburst at a meeting of New Brunswick academics raises a more bizarre possibility: that even a child of the Charter's chief architect may not know what is actually in the document.

How else can one explain the incredible timing of Mr. Trudeau's rumination? If you had to choose a venue in which to suggest that the existence of separate anglophone and francophone school systems was obsolete, divisive and costly, you'd be halfcrazy to even put New Brunswick on the list. It's a place where the surviving linguistic minority was not only conquered, but terrorized and dispersed. It's the only province where linguistic equality and linguistically separate school systems are guaranteed explicitly in the Charter -- a document that devotes more of its length to language rights than it does to due process or voting.

Yet despite Trudeau's apparent ignorance of the charter's provisions on linguistic school boards in New Brunswick, fundamentally he is right. Whatever it says in the charter, segregating public school students on the basis of language is as objectionable as segregating students by race.

You can teach French in English schools and English in French schools, but most kids will finish their schooling functionally unilingual without sufficient exposure to native speakers of the language they are trying to learn. Consequently, most of the money we spend in this country on English and French second-language training is wasted.

Why not put the French and English kids together in the same school and teach them to become proficient in both French and English as Trudeau suggests?

The truth which upsets governments

Al Gore is sticking it to the man. At least that is what they teach our kids in school. With An Inconvenient Truth on the grade 7 science curriculum, I suppose a question on my daughter's science test like this is to be expected:

Dans « An Inconvenient Truth » quelle est la vérité qui dérange les gouvernements de la Terre ? / What is the truth which upsets the planet's governments in "An Inconvenient Truth" (my translation from the original French)?

Feeding it back to them, my daughter got full marks by answering:

Que c’est notre faute que la terre est pollué assez (trop de CO2) pour réchauffé notre habitat et causé des changements qui vont finir en catastrophe si ont n’agit pas. / That it is our fault the planet is polluted enough (too much CO2) to heat up our environment and cause changes which are going to end in catastrophe if we do not act (again my translation).

Her cynicism amazes me. (The last couple of evenings she actually asked me to put on Al Gore's movie to help her sleep.) Of course, she is only telling her teachers what they want to hear.

I could not imagine myself at her age responding in a similar fashion. But then, I don't recall my teachers attempting to manipulate my views like that when I was in elementary school. That is not to say they did not attempt to inculcate shared societal values in their students, but nothing so overtly political as Al Gore's "truth". Teachers once knew where to draw the line.

While I applaud my daughter for her ability to resist and adapt (thanks, in part, to the Al Gore vaccine), it concerns me that we are effectively conditioning our children to discount anything and everything that is said by anyone in a position of authority, whether their teachers or their parents. Is it any wonder we find ourselves in a relativist morass when our kid's values and beliefs are considered fair game to be manipulated and shaped to fit some teacher's agenda?

Everything is spin. Even science. Al Gore knows it. Our kids do too.

Vaccine for An Inconvenient Truth

I was a little concerned when I learned my 13-year old daughter recently viewed Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in her grade 7 science class. It seems the film was presented as fact, without a hint of doubt about its content. Somehow I'm not surprised.

Fortunately, my daughter had been vaccinated against the Goracle plague that is sweeping the country, having previously watched the Manbearpig episode of South Park.



I asked her what she thought about what Al Gore was saying about global warming. She replied, "I think he's exaggerating Dad."

Smart kid.