Left vs Right – Cost Of Bilingualism – RCMP not Law Makers
Left vs Right – Cost Of Bilingualism – RCMP not Law Makers
I’m often asked versions of the following: Given that the political right is so corrupted by conservatives who seek to limit liberty in countless ways, wouldn’t it be better to abandon the language of “left” vs. “right” and adopt new terminology?
My answer is that, because the terms “left” and “right” are already widely used to denote the basic political alternative, and because that alternative is in fact binary, the best approach for advocates of freedom is not to reject the prevalent terminology but to clarify it—by defining the relevant terms.
The problem with conventional approaches to the left-right political spectrum is that they either fail to define the alternatives in question, or proceed to define them in terms of non-essentials.
One common approach, for instance, fails to specify the precise nature of either side, yet proceeds to place communism, socialism, and modern “liberalism” on (or toward) the left—and fascism, conservatism, and capitalism on (or toward) the right.
This makes no sense, at least in terms of the right. Capitalism—the social system of individual rights, property rights, and personal liberty—has nothing in common with conservatism or fascism. Take them in turn.
more at http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/06/political-left-and-right-properly-defined/
Cost Of Bilingualism
Ottawa spends $1.5 billion a year on official bilingualism, and that’s a conservative estimate.
It includes the cost of printing laws and government forms in both French and English, and offering bilingual service at federal offices and courts. It covers the budget of the federal language nannies at the official languages office. And it includes training civil servants to speak both languages and paying them bonuses for doing so, plus ad campaigns extolling the glories of bilingualism.
But it doesn’t include the $900 million spent by the provinces or the hundreds of millions more spent by private companies to comply with federal and provincial language regulations.
Given that the Official Languages Act is now more than 40 years old, it is not much of a stretch to conclude that Canadians have spent more than $80 billion (in 2012 dollars) — maybe a lot more — on promoting and enforcing our phony linguistic duality.
It’s time this expensive experiment in social engineering was ended.
As 2011 census figures on language revealed this week, all the money and effort expended has achieved almost nothing. Whereas about 14% of Canadians claimed to be bilingual on the 1971 census, last year just 17% did. And the rise over 40 years has been almost all from francophones who learned English because they wanted to or because they felt they had to to succeed.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/10/26/time-to-bid-official-bilingualism-adieu-we-canadians-are-finding-our-own-language-levels-without-the-help-of-bureaucratic-language-monitors
RCMP
Even if you think it’s a good thing that a line of scary looking Swiss rifles are now banned in Canada, it should really scare you that they were arbitrarily declared illegal by police, not Parliament. It is a dark day when police, not the people’s elected representatives, can suddenly transform thousands of ordinary, law-abiding Canadians into criminals with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen.
Last week, Mounties declared a list of Swiss-made, military-looking rifles to be “prohibited.” The banned models had been sold legally in Canada since 2000 and as many as 13,000 Canadians own one or more.
Like many Swiss commodities, such as watches and chocolates, these well-made firearms are high-end items costing $3,000 to $4,000 or more.
Initially the word was that as of 10 p.m. Eastern time last Thursday, these guns were to be surrendered to the government without compensation. Firearms shop owners, who had them in inventory, likewise were expected to turn over their stock to the government which would not pay for the property it was confiscating. (The federal government announced Monday a five-year amnesty for owners of the Swiss rifles, saying they won’t face the threat of criminal charges.)
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/03/05/rmps-arbitrary-gun-ban-is-frightening
brian lovig,right edition