OK, I got so busy beating up on Matti, I forgot to speak to this.

Sorry, but your republic has it’s own boatload of problems. While the US is on my list of places I might move if the Martin regime stays in power(I’d prefer Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Estonia, in that order, but the wife wants to be able to see her family at some point), I’m somewhat uncomfortable with some of the aspects of your government. I also happen to love living in British Columbia.

That’s a faint achievement. What Canadians need to realize that outside of Ottawa based legal scholars, nobody takes Trudeau’s Charter as even a semi-relevant document on rights. In fact, it’s viewed as pretty much on the same level of the Soviet Union’s old Bill of Rights(They had one too).

The reason is right at the start:

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

What that section means is that your “rights” are only there as long as they don’t get in the way of the government. There are two problems with that:

First, “rights” are simply what the majority, as expressed by the government, cannot do to the individual.

Second, the document doesn’t really define clearly who gets to determine what is “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified”. The entire patriation of the BNA was also a dismal failure due to Trudeau’s “bait and switch” on our rights and worse, the “mirror trick” that he pulled off with the Supreme Court.

The problem with the Supreme Court is that people in Canada have an assumption that the Canadian Supreme Court is exactly like the US Supreme Court. It’s not. The US Supreme Court is a full fledged branch of the US federal republic. The Canadian Supreme Court is not created by the BNA/CCA, it’s simply enabled by an act of Parliament. If the PM starts to not like what the SCC is doing, a wave of his hand and a quick vote in Parliament and they’re not “Supreme” any more. That’s why Trudeau left the SCC unelected and archaic in nature: If he ever needed to reverse them, he wanted to be able to claim he was “reforming” it, not replacing it.

I’m not like most British Columbians, who view Trudeau as somewhere near Satan in terms of evil, but instead see Trudeau and his ilk as idealists. Trudeau never planned to ever leave office and even on the level that he knew that someday he would, even if carried out in a coffin, it never occured to him that less of an idealist could ever become PM. He never envisioned that a thug or a criminal could ever become PM. This is really sad, mainly because Trudeau was an abberation, even in his time: Most of his government was just as corrupt as the Mulroney and Cretin regimes. He really believed that he had created a “just society” where only the very best and brightest could rise to his office.

In short Matti, you have no rights, at least in the sense that other Western nations define them.

Certainly, Canada is not without its own problems. But, unlike the U.S. Constitution, which is being progressively eroded (especially with respect to the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendments) by expedient legislation such as the ‘Patriot Act’, Canadians’ rights under our Charter remain largely intact.

I still have confidence that I won’t be rousted off an inter-city bus by armed constabulary at 3:00 a.m. for an unreasonable search, as happened to me in Arkansas last year. Admittedly, as an alien, I could claim no protection under your Constitution, but I watched as several dozen Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights were flagrantly violated. Presumably with impunity, because they were black, poor and politically unconnected.

By most objective international standards, the quality of life in the US is on the decline. As the gulf between the rich and poor widens, as compromises in personal freedoms are introduced in the name of ‘national security’, as political corruption continues largely unabated, claims of ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ ring somewhat hollow.

Claims of democracy are hollow without an informed electorate, a viable and free press and freedom from censorship. America has now dropped to forty-fourth place in the world in terms of freedom of the press (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders)

America’s record on human rights abuses has become a scandal (http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/usa-summary-eng), it now leads the world in incarceration rates (http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/pub9036.pdf),
continues to slip on the UN’s ‘Human Development Index’, falling to tenth place in 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index), largely reflecting its levels of poverty and inequality.

America is a great nation. But it could be a true world leader with a rational foreign policy and improved social equality for its citizens.

While I don’t agree 100% with you, I agree it’s tempting to just pull up stakes and move somewhere else, my brother and his wife live in Texas, and visiting them is always a sobering experience.

No country however is without its problems (political, economic and social), and the real problem here is that despite my irritation with the politicians, and indeed a good portion of the citizens, I still have a great deal of love for this country. It’s my home, it’s my country.

For better or worse the lesson here is that I (and others) clearly have to make an effort to change things. If we fail, then perhaps I’ll flee. For now, I’d be remiss not to make an effort to stop the downwards slide.

I am given to understand that Canada was a perfectly livable place up until the 1970s, when leftist politicians, disappointed by their performance in the elections decided to begin importing the entire population of the Third World, who are guaranteed to vote for whomever promises them a bigger welfare check, then raise taxes on productive citizens to feed the aforementioned instant Liberal Party voters, then disarm the entire population because 1) umpteen million ineducable, uncivilizable, illiterate inbred IQ-55 savages from Haiti, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia, and the People’s Republic of Gumbystan cannot be trusted with firearms (or liquor, or matches, or…) and 2) productive citizens resent being bled white to feed the aforementioned Instant Liberal Voters.

Leave Canada behind. Come to America, where, at least if you avoid the immediate environs of Chicago and the large cities of the coasts, you will be treated like a human being. We even have a Constitution, though our politicians ignore it as often as not.