Setting The Record Straight About Doug Ford

As Ontario nears its next provincial election, the political establishment is working itself into a panicked frenzy.

Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Liberal Party are so unpopular that it seems a near certainty that she'll lose on June 7, and will be replaced by the Progressive Conservative Party headed by Doug Ford.

Both Doug and his late brother Rob were the subjects of unprecedented media attacks while they served as elected officials in Toronto, Rob as mayor and Doug as a City Councillor and his brother's right hand man. Those attacks involved media stalking the Fords, inventing lies about them, and writing columns so histrionic that they did more damage to the credibility of the news outlets which published them than they did to Doug and Rob. The main motivation behind the attacks was that the Fords were populists committed to serving the actual public and not the city's well-heeled establishment and the special interest groups with which they work hand-in-glove.

Doug himself has been accused of being part of the 'elites' he decries. Indeed Doug Ford does come from an affluent family, but it was recent, self-made wealth by Doug Ford Sr. The Fords were never part of Toronto's established Old Boys Network. The business that Doug Sr started was built up to a huge, transnational success by Doug, who established a branch in Chicago as well as the home base in Etobicoke that is one of the continent's major label manufacturers.

I've come to know Doug pretty well in the last few months and I've come to consider him a friend. He's spent time at my home and we've had long talks about political philosophy, the direction Ontario, Toronto, and the country has been and is heading, the role of media, and all sorts of topics.

The establishment is worried to the extent that they're pulling out all the stops and spreading every lie they can think of to slander Doug before election day. And hearing those lies being told about a friend is somewhat upsetting, so I think it's time to set the record straight on a few of them.

An astroturf group which implausibly denies links to Kathleen Wynne's Liberal Party has been dishonestly implying, and in cases outright lying, about Doug being antisemitic and homophobic.

These are blantanty false accusations which are the opposite of the truth.

One incident, which I only recently recalled, is a particular example of how Doug went out of his way to fight antisemitism in Toronto when almost all of his then-City Council colleagues were too cowardly to do anything about it.

A few years ago, back in 2011, I was in contact with Rob Ford's office about the proposed use of city property to host an antisemitc hate fest known as Al Quds Day.  That annual event was created by Iran's despotic, homicidal Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini to promote the genocide of Israel's Jews. These al Quds Day rallies routinely feature calls to violence against civilians and expressions of antisemtic hatred.

While most of City Council sat on their thumbs in fear of offending the Islamists behind Toronto's al Quds Day, Doug stepped up to the plate without a moment's hesitation. Fighting the City's bureaucracy, which contains a few unsavory, pro-Islamist people who are armed with a spool of red tape big enough to color the CN Tower crimson from top to bottom, Doug nonetheless did all he could to have the al Quds Day fanatics prevented from using a taxpayer-supported facility to spew their hate.

In the end, because of opposition by some of the entrenched, NDP-linked bureaucracy at City Hall, Doug was unsuccessful at getting the al Quds Day event removed from the City facility, but much to the Islamists' chagrin, had Toronto Police send an officer from the Hate Crimes Unit to monitor their malevolent jamboree, which forced them to moderate from their usual vicious bile.

Doug stood up for the Jews when the so-called 'progressives' at City Hall enabled or cowered in silence in the face of antisemitism.

As to Doug's supposed homophobia, the 'proof' offered by an asinine propaganda website operated by anonymous trolls relates to the complete distortion of something Doug said about an incident that occurred when a few protesters crashed a Ford Fest, a  big, multicultural barbecue put on by the Ford family every year. One of the anti-Ford protesters carried a sign upon which was printed '#1 Ford Hater." A couple of the protesters were wearing rainbow flags. The anti-Ford protesters were confronted by some Ford supporters and among the back and forth, regrettably, there were some anti-gay comments made by a couple of people.

In the aftermath of the kerfuffle at Ford Fest, Doug, who said and did nothing homophobic, and who was not in the altercation, nonetheless apologized for what those few Ford supporters did to the protester. He also reasonably noted that if people go to an event, even a sporting event, for the purpose of taunting people as the protesters did, the result, far from being surprising, is more likely exactly the attention the protesters wanted.

At the time, Doug observed, "you can't show up at a Yankees game with a Red Sox hat on" or in that instance, it's absurd to come to a Ford party for the purpose of trashing the Fords, and expect no trouble. That's just obvious logic. Characterizing that as homophobia by Doug, as the anonymous trolls at notdoug.com attempt, is a sleazy lie, just as disseminating sleazy lies and intentionally deceptive mischaracterizations is the purpose of that website.

As it happens, Doug has many friends in Toronto's gay community, has reached out to help them when they were in need, and had even donated $4000 of his own money to Toronto's Pride Festival. These are hardly the hallmarks of a homophobe.

From a long career in different aspects of media, including a major Hollywood production company which has won multiple Academy Awards, experience has taught me that the personalities of public figures as they present on TV are rarely precise representations of them in real life. But there are exceptions.

My friend Tarek Fatah is one who is very much in private the way he comes across in media, he's passionate, excitable, and deeply committed to the causes about which he speaks. Doug Ford is another case where the private and public person are basically the same.

The ways that the private Doug and the public one differ is that Doug's great sense of humor, his politeness, and the touch of shyness that is about him don't fully come across on TV. But the essence of the man is there and what you see with Ford is what you get. If he says something he means it, which contrasts with the politicians we're used to, and who spend more time trying to avoid telling us what they really think than they do in being straightforward. He's absolutely committed to doing good for his community and the people. Unlike just about every other politician I've ever met, Doug does most of that good without seeking publicity for it, taking satisfaction in having helped out the people who needed his assistance.

One of the reasons Doug is running for Premier which he and I have discussed is that he believes in the rights of individuals to be respected as individuals. The government takes money from us in the form of taxes, and taxpayers have a right to expect government to be accountable to them and treat them fairly. We have a right to be treated as individuals, not members of a collective.

The Liberals cynically play the identity politics game pitting communities against each other while completely disregarding individuality or accountability. That was in plain display recently when Kathleen Wynne spoke about telling young voters that they have to vote to prevent old white people from deciding elections.

Compare that with Doug, who in explaining why he opposed al Quds Day fanatics from using City property to demonize Israel's Jews said he doesn't "believe city facilities should be used by one community to denounce another."

There's a stark choice in this election. Continuing with Kathleen Wynne's disastrous fiscal policies and cynically divisive Identity Politics from a Liberal government that believes it should be able to control every aspect of the lives of Ontarians. Under her administration, the overriding philosophy is that the people should be accountable to government.

Alternately, we have Doug Ford, who respects individual rights, and who believes that government's role is to protect people's freedom, and not to take it away from them. Doug will make sure government is fully accountable to the people, respects all of us, and will ensure that public servants are there to serve the public, not the other way round.

Take the chance to meet Doug if you can in this time leading up to June 7th. The real Doug Ford is not the person that most of the establishment media portrays. He's a good, decent, compassionate man and he will be a great, much needed Premier for Ontario.

At the Manning Conference, Doug Ford demonstrated that he's the best bet the Progressive Conservatives have to defeat Wynne

While it wasn't exactly a lion's den that Doug Ford walked into on Saturday morning, it was in front of a crowd at the Manning Conference in Ottawa more likely to be inimical than friendly.

The Manning Conference is conservative in bent, but those attending the three-day event are mainly the 'elites' in the conservative movement, the very people Ford has said have lost touch with the common person in Ontario. His disfavor among the Conservative patrician class was suggested by the disadvantageous time slot he was allocated. Eight fifteen on a Saturday morning following a Friday night of parties and entertainment at hospitality suites that went into the wee hours seemed a guarantee of a poor turnout. But interest in the populist firebrand was so substantial that Ford drew a much larger crowd than Caroline Mulroney had the day before and was about equal to the size Christine Elliott garnered at the prime time she was given just before lunch.

The interview was conducted by columnist and radio host Anthony Furey, who is one of Canada's most capable, thoughtful, reasonable journalists. He evoked Ford's approach to leadership and the person beyond just the politician. Ford's sharp contrast to  his rivals won over many of the Manning attendees. More importantly, it is likely to win over Ontarians of all political stripes.

Christine Elliott repeated that she was willing to welcome anyone who shares her "conservative values." Ford however stressed that his movement reaches out to, and and takes in, people who are politically unaffiliated as well as those who identify as NDP or Liberal. Political party membership doesn't mean acceptance of the total fiscal irresponsibility that Kathleen Wynne has brought to the province. Ford discussed the huge numbers of hard-working union members who support him, and are fed up with the incompetence and over-taxation that are key components of the Wynne government.  I can attest to that. I have friends in public service unions who are disgusted with the waste they see of taxpayer dollars at their places of work, and how increases in taxes do little that isn't for the benefit of high-paid insiders.

It was the sort of talk, along with his commitment to lowering taxes and government interference in people's lives, that won the room over for Ford. The other factor that overwhelmingly favors Ford is his sincerity. Christine Elliott and Caroline Mulroney seem like nice people, but they exude neither  full commitment nor total sincerity. One gets the feeling from Mulroney and Elliott that they tailor their message to whichever room where they're speaking. With Ford, you get the same message, and  know that whether or not you like what you're hearing, he means it. That's something even the Toronto Star begrudgingly recognizes.

To win the general election, the Progressive Conservative leader needs to understand how to reach out to everyone in the province. Ford knows that better than anyone. Ford Nation, which the left-wing Toronto Star enjoys disparaging, is the antithesis of the reality of the establishment who deride it. If you go to a Liberal Party meeting, you could be forgiven for confusing it with a Bay Street Bankers conference from 1972. As for the NDP, one of their their typical gatherings usually is exclusively made up of more bitter, old, upper-middle class white people than a John Birch Society meeting.

But at a Doug Ford rally, you'll find a wide mix of every ethnicity, age, and income status that you can find among the province's citizens. It's that broad-based appeal that is one of the main differences between Ford and his rivals. Beyond that is charisma and the ability to communicate a message. Those are traits that neither Mulroney or Elliott possess to the impressive extent as Ford. In fact, Mulroney's public performance was so weak that rumors are now circulating that she is planning to drop out of the leadership contest soon.

Despite being abysmal at governing, Kathleen Wynne is a formidable election campaigner. Whether Ford wins the Progressive Conservative Party by election or acclimation, one thing most people have come to realize is that he is the one candidate with the determination, the fighting skills, and the credibility to defeat the Wynne government and reverse the dire economic situation the Liberals have brought to Ontario.

University of Toronto professor says some classroom activism fostered by The Toronto District School Board and OISE amounts to child abuse

There are teachers in the Toronto District School Board who are subjecting children in Toronto's public schools to child abuse on a daily basis. 

It's a minority of them to be sure, but they are in the system and they operate with the blessing of the School Board and of Ontario's foremost teachers college.

The University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has posted a number of interviews with active public school teachers promoting teacher activism in the classroom. The interviews will come as a surprise to those who think the purpose of school is to teach children essential knowledge of mathematics, grammar, geography, literature and civics.

Instead of that core foundation,  these activist teachers feel they have a mandate to promote their own politics and biases to the children over whom they have been given authority.

Among OISE's exemplars of activism are Jason Kunin, a teacher at Toronto's Vaughn Road Academy, a public high school, who has used his class to promote his anti-Israel extremism. Another is David Stocker, a teacher at Toronto's Cityview Alternative School who gained considerable notoriety for his intention to raise one of his children to be "genderless," and who asserts his right to condition his students to his own brand of activism.

Manifestations of this teacher activism include the use of science classes to organize student hunger strikes and demonstrations against the Enbridge oil pipeline, and the use of math classes to convince children about the supposed ills of capitalism.

University of Toronto professor of International Relations and Political Science Aurel Braun considers much of the type of indoctrination practiced by activist teachers to be a form of child abuse.

Children in school are a captive audience, Braun notes, and the purpose of education is to provide them with a diversity of views and objective, ascertainable facts so that they have the tools to become thinking, productive citizens capable of reaching their own conclusions.

Instead, Braun, who is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University's Department of Government, suggests the daily reiteration of a particular, political outlook inflicted by activist teachers on their students is similar to the psychological conditioning that is a feature of totalitarian societies.

He compares it with the type of indoctrination for children that was conceived by Vladimir Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist leader's subsequent dictatorship in Russia.

Braun's analogy is particularly apt, since David Stocker asserts that the tools an activist teacher should use are the teachings of Paulo Friere, a Brazilian Maoist who extolled Lenin in his seminal work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In Canada, there is an explicit contract between the government and the consumers of education, those being the children who attend classes and the parents who entrust their children to the care of the state. The most basic aspect of that contract is that the school system will not abuse and inflict harm on their children.

Many take the view that continually subjecting children to politicized biases is harmful to them as it both warps their worldview and detracts from the skills and objectivity they will require to be successful later on in life.

"Of course they're biased, because all classrooms are biased" Stocker asserts by way of an excuse in one of his interviews. "This is mandated by the board. It's about Human Rights Work, and we have an ethical and moral obligation to do it and yes we're going to do it."

But frequently, what is "ethical or moral," and in certain instances what would be considered a "human right," is warped beyond all recognition by activist teachers who may use those terms as a means to deprive others of their rights.

Unequivocal human rights could involve activism against the ethnic slaughter of black Africans in Darfur, or against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. But that is not what the TDSB's activist teachers see as "moral and ethical." Instead, they compel their students to engage with groups such as OCAP and No One Is Illegal,  that advocate for class warfare and aspire to cripple Canada's economy, or those like the deceptively-named Canadian Peace Alliance, which acts as apologist for totalitarians who kill Gays and persecute ethnic and religious minorities.

It should come as little shock that OISE would be promoting such totalitarian-leaning classroom proselytizing. That institute recently appointed a professor named Abigail Bakan to head its "Social Justice" Education department. Bakan, a conspiracy theorist,  is one of the founders of the International Socialist organization and has been a speaker at antisemitic al Quds Day celebrations. The Al Quds Day activities are the brainchild of the sadistic leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Last year, a Queen's Park al Quds rally featuring Canadian Peace Alliance boss Sid Lacombe, whom Jason Kunin called to lecture to his class, was notable for inciting participants to commit a genocide of Jews in Israel.

This is the face of  classroom "Social Justice" activism that your children are forced to endure, day after day. Most teachers are too decent and too smart to subject their students to such abuse. Thankfully, plenty of those students unfortunate enough to have activist instructors realize their teachers are not particularly intelligent propagandists. However, there are many students who will readily absorb the conditioning that activist educators inflict upon them. And for the majority of students who just want to acquire credits so they can graduate and go on to what comes next, they may not emerge from public schools unscathed. Like plants growing next to a poisoned water supply, eventually, some of the toxins in which classroom activist teachers immerse their students may seep into them through the osmosis of constant exposure.

It is critical that parents become aware of what is happening to their children in public schools. Because this form of child abuse will continue to harm new generations of students until the public raises an outcry that forces a response from Ontario's Ministry of Education.



h/t Socialist Studies

The Toronto District School Board is using English classes to indoctrinate children to a "genderless society"

Sitting on a little over an acre of prime real estate, just on the other side of the south end of Toronto's trendy, hyper-liberal Annex neighborhood, is Central Technical School.

Amidst leafy streets lined with Victorian row houses in an area populated largely by university professors, downtown professionals and urban hipsters, Central Tech is a huge Edwardian structure that, with its adjacent playing field, takes up an entire large city block.  The century-old stone building physically resembles any number of large high schools throughout North America erected around the same time.  But the school is unique in Toronto in that it draws students from all over the city who come for its specialized technological, trades, and arts courses, which they provide in addition to the regular provincial curriculum.

My son is a student there and through my involvement as a co-Chair of the School Council, I have come to learn that Central Tech has the advantage of an exceptionally professional administrative team and some outstanding teachers.

But some of them have taken the curriculum that was the brainchild of former Education Minister and current Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Deputy Minister of Education, accused child pornographer Ben Levin, more to heart than is comfortable for many patents.

In the newly commenced semester, one of my son's courses is English. On the first day, the class' permanent teacher was not yet assigned and a temp took charge.

The day's assignment was to read a Toronto Star article about the "genderless child" whose sex was being kept a secret by its parents, one of whom is a Toronto District School Board alternative school teacher.  They were also assigned a short story called The Story of X, by Lois Gould. First published in MS. Magazine in 1972, it is a whimsical, but rather tritely-written short story that questions gender roles and apparently served as the inspiration for the Toronto couple to turn their child into a human Guinea Pig for a social experiment.

Now thanks to Kathleen Wynne, her rubber-stamp Education Minister Liz Sandals,  and the social engineers running the TDSB, every child in the public school system is part of their deplorable experiment in restructuring human behavior.

Discussing the role of gender in society is not something I would find objectionable. But it belongs in a Social Studies class. The aim of the radicals running the school system in Ontario is to alter the next generation with a type of politicized education masquerading as "social justice" that is insinuated into every course, despite its irrelevance to the actual subject matter.

Making the situation more egregious is that there actually are opportunities to discuss gender in established literature. If a teacher feels the need to discuss gender issues in English class, why not teach Twelfth Night, in which the female protagonist Viola assumes the identity of a male? A teacher who shared that play with a class would provide to students the added benefit of familiarizing them with one of the most important works in the body of English Literature.  But perhaps expecting Shakespeare to be taught by the Wynne/Sandals/Levin educational regime is unrealistic. After all, that would require students to spend a lot of time immersed in the Eurocentric, patriarchal values upon which western civilization was built. And that runs contrary to the new belief system in which Ontario wants to condition all of its children.

If a lesson requires a short story, there are innumerable volumes of outstanding works which the current crop of students find excluded from their curriculum.

Instead, we have a generation of children who are entering universities unable to punctuate sentences properly. The only O Henry of which the vast majority of these kids have ever heard is the homonymic candy bar. Yet rather than de Maupassant or H.H. Munro, they are subjected to polemical, on-the-nose, banal literary detritus. Because a primary goal of the TDSB is the social objective of explicit instruction in the proper way of thinking in our-soon-to-be genderless civilization.

One of the architects of contemporary Gender Studies is a dour academic named Judith Butler. Though acclaimed in some circles, Butler is widely derided as a tedious pedant whose main talent is her ability to utilize copious amounts of meaningless jargon to obfuscate and equivocate.  When Butler is nailed down on a position, it is often on something as puerile as her pronouncement that the misogynistic, fanatically fundamentalist, religious terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah are "social movements that are progressive, that are on the left." That assessment of Butler's was based on her sole, defining criterion of them being "anti-imperialist." Even within that nescient framework, she discounts those terror groups' support for the imperialism that led to the spread of Islam throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia, Africa and Europe and their current aspirations to expand it further.

Gender Studies is essentially a politicized branch of Philosophy. Its adherents in our system, driven by a cult-like devotion in places like the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, lack a basic knowledge of relevant biology and psychiatry. But even so, they feel qualified to proselytize a new order of gender roles and have invented a pseudo-science backed up, not by data, but by their aspirations for a world that reflects their own image. Tellingly, they are heavily invested in outmoded psychoanalytical theories which were almost completely abandoned within psychiatry decades ago.

So while the least capable minds in the academy populate 'grievance studies' subjects like Gender Studies, real science has left them far behind, establishing that there are distinct, discernible differences in the brain structures of men and women.

It wasn't so long ago that a medical term for someone whose sense of gender didn't match their biology was "mentally ill." Evidently the difference between sex and gender is that the former is biological and the latter is a sense of self. But since the biological component drives behavior, it seems that plenty of us, including the "genderless" child's parents, are confused about the whole matter.

In nature, female lions are no more socialized to care for their young than a male Black Widow spider is socialized to allow the female to eat him during mating. Still, despite obvious biological differences between male and females, Toronto's educrats want children to believe that male and female roles among humans are merely a "social construct" which they should abandon.

We shouldn't discriminate against transexuals in any way. They are people who have a condition that causes them great difficulty, and it is often a troubling and courageous effort that leads them to alter the sexual identity with which they were born. But consider that their condition is something that requires surgery to correct, which is covered by publicly-funded heath insurance. So it is, by definition,  an illness.

But more to the point, English classes are supposed to teach English and not to encourage children in public schools to question and abandon their concepts of gender.

The troubling part of this sinister remodeling is that, for the most part, it slips by unnoticed. Most parents are oblivious to the particulars of their children's daily curriculum. Once the symptoms become apparent, it is well past the point where serious damage is done, as in the plummeting math scores of kids who were subjected to Ontario's faddish educational designs.

One thing is for certain. If Kathleen Wynne's government is returned to power, they will take it as an endorsement of their mandate and the indoctrination of Ontario's children will only intensify.

Olivia Chow wants to be your kids' role model

Chow demonstrating with Islamist hatemonger and antisemitic al Quds Day organizer Zafar Bangash

NDP MP Olivia Chow has been making the rounds pushing her memoirs and in an effort to boost sales, is coyly hinting about her widely presumed entry into Toronto's 2014 mayoral race.

Part of the purpose of Chow's tedious exercise in narcissism, titled My Journey, is to whitewash her past with some revisionist history.

As The Globe and Mail reports:  

Ms. Chow also tries to clear the air on the accusations that she and Mr. Layton lived in subsidized units when they both had apartments in a downtown Toronto co-op housing building before and after they were married.

“Both Jack and I paid full market rent for our apartments,” she writes, later adding, “The self-appointed lynch mob sought to destroy the safe haven Jack and I sought not just for our family but for the community. To this day, the slander is repeated by people who mistakenly believed it at the time – as well as by opponents who know better.”

Since Ms Chow is claiming it's "slander" to accuse her and her husband, who were making a combined annual income of almost $150,000 of exploiting taxpayers and abusing their position by helping themselves to subsidized housing, then she may want to take issue with the official record of the Legislature of Ontario.

According to Hansard (the Legislature's official transcripts), a 1998 exchange between Provincial Housing Minister Al Leach and MPP's Rosario Marchese, Terence Young, and John Gerretsen went as follows:

Mr Young: In New York City today, I'm sure you're aware, Minister -- I don't know if the committee members are aware -- there are rental control units occupied by wealthy movie stars, $2,000 a month or whatever. We've seen a situation here where two Toronto councillors with the combined income of I think over $130,000 to $140,000 a year were both living in government-assisted housing. How do we prevent wealthy people from living in housing subsidized by their fellow taxpayers and just get money to the people who have the need?

Mr Marchese: They were paying market value, Terry.

Mr Gerretsen: Those people were paying market value.

Hon Mr Leach: I'm aware of the councillors in question. I understand that they are no longer living there but they were paying market value. But as I pointed out earlier, the market value that was charged to a co-op was about $900 a month where the actual cost of operating the unit was $1,200 a month, so that people who claimed that they were paying market value were still getting a substantial subsidy from the taxpayers of Ontario. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. I believe that the individuals you are talking about, who will go nameless, are no longer in that circumstance.

Mr Marchese: Would that be Jack Layton and Olivia Chow?

Hon Mr Leach: I think if you look around the city of Toronto council, you might find that there are still a couple who are living in co-op housing units.

Mr Marchese: I used to live in one too.

Hon Mr Leach: It's a good concept as long as you pay your full share. If you want to pay $1,200 a month, which is the actual operating cost, be my guest, but don't live in a co-op saying you're paying market rent of $900 when it costs $1,200 to operate and you're getting a subsidy of $300 from the taxpayers of Ontario.

When asked about Toronto's current mayor, Chow's pat line, which she has repeated in a number of interviews, is that she doesn't 'think Rob Ford is a very good role model for the kids.'

Oh. So is that what we elect our mayors to do, be role models for 8 year olds?

Actually, 'a role model for the kids'  isn't a consideration when I cast a vote. I want a politician who tries to keep election promises and takes the use of public expenditures and the wishes of constituents very seriously. As long as he or she is doing a good job representing my interests, as far as a politician's personal life goes, as the expression goes, I couldn't give a toss.

If being a role model is the case, then one could as easily question the value of the leadership of a dopey pothead who only got his job because he has a famous last name. Or that of a pompous liar who frequented hand job parlors.

Ms Chow's repeated criticism of Ford's adequacy as a role model suggests she thinks that she would make a suitable substitute in that department.

There probably aren't a lot of people who would want someone for a role model who is a rich person who shrilly accuses people of "slander" for calling her out for milking taxpayers for $300 a month.

For that matter, I'm not sure how someone who has spent almost all her adult life in the public trough as a professional politician, with no notable political achievement to her name other than being the junior partner in a political marriage, qualifies as a role model. But you wouldn't know that from the way the liberal media fawns over Ms. Chow.

While they were both MP's Jack Layton and Olivia Chow could be described as Mr. & Mrs. Gravy Train. The pair of them charged over $1.1 million per year to Canadian taxpayers in expenses alone so they could maintain their lavish lifestyle.

Rob Ford has voluntarily returned his salary increases back to the City each year and cut his own office budget and expenses. Considering that, Olivia Chow may want to stop using her "role model" line, because upon closer examination, compared to Rob Ford, she may not do too well in that area either.

h/t Sanwin

Ontario Catholic School using weird, conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo as a teaching tool

Since deleted, a tweet from St. Anne's Catholic School in Kanata, Ontario from the twitter account evidently run by the school's principal, provided a link to a YouTube video that was being used by the school as a teaching tool. I was notified about this by a concerned parent who has demanded an investigation into what other bizarre, scientifically unsubstantiated teaching material is being used by the Catholic School Board.

The video makes claims about the paranormal attributes of Solfeggio frequencies. It should be noted that in music, solfège, or in Italian, solfeggio, is a traditional method used to teach pitch and sight singing. But the myth of the "lost solfeggio frequencies" described in the video is something very different to that.

The Solfeggio frequencies are supposedly lost frequencies that were alleged to have been used in Gregorian Chants. They are claimed, by the same sort of people who believe in global conspiracies by Illuminati, to have miraculous powers.

While faith in miracles is part of Catholic catechism, as far as I'm aware, being able to conjure them on demand with song is not part of that belief. The video apparently used at the school claims that one of these frequencies can "undo situations and facilitate change" another can "perform repair on your DNA" and "initiate transformation and miracles."

The video also asserts the frequencies "are guaranteed to work."

According to the narration in the video, "the Catholic Church presumably lost these original chants," but really "it was a transparent attempt to hide these incredibly powerful chants, so none of the Masses could energize their souls. It was all about control and concealment, to prevent people from gaining the amazing benefit of these frequencies."

Which means that by promoting this in school, either someone at the Catholic School Board has gone batpoo crazy, or I better start throwing some Gregorian Chants on my CD player.

This is the video to which the school linked:



UPDATE: The school is claiming that the linked video was posted in error and a different video is used to teach students about fibonacci numbers - but for some reason, they haven't identified what that video is.


h/t James D.

The Holocaust and Hot Babes presented by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal

Due disclosure - I used to consult for the Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC).

Having said that, I no longer work for the FSWC and don`t owe them anything. So taking all that into account, I`m going to tell you about the gala they put on Sunday night at the Wychwood Barns to launch their "Tour for Humanity" bus, which is their big genocide-awareness and education mobile. The bus will travel to schools and public events throughout Ontario.

This is the sight to which
I entered the FSWC gala

It's not a bad idea, given that just about all the things that pass for "social justice" in schools these days is founded in Marxist bullshit predicated on the teachings of a degenerate Maoist named Paulo Friere, whose book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is required reading at Teachers`Colleges. The fact that an acolyte of the most prolific mass-murderer in history is considered the apogee of equity by `progressive` educators is indicative of the sad state of our schools.

But that aside, there were some very good aspects and a somewhat troublesome one to the FSWC event last night.

Ontario's Minister for Economic Development and the local MPP, Eric Hoskins, gave a fine speech in which he extolled the Ontario and Canadian governments' close relationship with Israel, lavishing praise upon the middle east's lone liberal democracy.

Tim Uppal speaks at
the FSWC gala

Later in the evening, a remarkably spry 83-year old Holocaust survivor named Max Eisen spoke movingly about the many lives lost because the "civilized" world turned its back on Jews who attempted to flee Hitler. One of the worst such culprits was William Lyon Mackenzie King's government, which instituted its infamous "none is too many" policy towards Jews seeking sanctuary from the Holocaust.

When Max Eisen recounted that unfortunate part of Canadian history, I turned to Tim Uppal, the federal government's Minister of State for Multiculturalism, who was standing beside me, getting ready to deliver the next speech. "You better remind them that Mackenzie King was a Liberal," I quipped.

That cracked Tim up a bit.

Tim delivered a brief, thoughtful talk about the importance of the work FSWC does and the need for Holocaust education. What was implicit in Tim's speech but not said was the way that hateful bigots in our society, particularly among those laying claim to being advocates of "Social Justice," would like the whole association of Jews, The Holocaust and Israel to just go away.

Another sexy FSWC Go-Go girl

Tim Uppal is a great reminder of how deep the benches of Stephen Harper's Conservative government remain. It's filled with extremely bright, capable people of whom Uppal is but one example among many.

Which leads us to the next person to take the podium at the FSWC gala. I've read much from former Liberal Justice Minister and current Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler, but never heard him speak in person before. Cotler is considered one of the intellectual eminences among the federal Liberal party. But with a Leader of the light caliber of Justin Trudeau, that distinction is a pretty low hurdle to achieve.

Last night I learned how low.

Though obviously a decent, well-intentioned man, he remains a proponent of censorship laws that flout some of the basic principles of free speech and are rife with potential for abuse.

Building himself up to a crescendo of hyperbole, Cotler got to the point in his speech that extolled hate speech laws, screaming "The Holocaust began with words!"

Well, Irwin, so did The Enlightenment and the American Revolution.

But no, the Holocaust didn't really begin with words. It began, like other genocides began, when a government decided to restrict what people can do and say, and that they can be imprisoned and abused based on their beliefs. Which, though not with the same intent, pretty much describes the type of laws for which Cotler advocates.

For reasons unknown, a lovely acrobat
performed contortions in a bubble

Cotler seems to have forgotten that most of us who are opposed to censorship laws aren't in favor of hate speech, but believe that the best way to combat lies is with truth, and by exposing the liars as fools. One aspect of his ideas that Cotler conveniently omitted was, just who gets to decide which words are OK and which words aren`t?  Irwin Cotler and Justin Trudeau? Or maybe the Supreme Court? Unless someone is calling for violence or lawbreaking, I think I'd prefer to take my chances with unfettered free speech.

So after all the speeches, I made one of my frequent trips back to the bar to chat up a beautiful bartender named Kelsey. Handing me a glass of white wine, she asked me what I was doing at the gala. Even though I was dolled up in a nice suit and a rather snazzy tie I picked up from Stollery's a few months ago, I suppose I didn't seem like the typical sort for that type of thing. When I told her "media" she asked me what angle I was going to take on the night.

Thinking for a moment, I responded, "Well, I guess 'The Holocaust and Hot Babes' just about sums it up for me."

One thing I immediately noticed when entering the FSWC gala was how many very attractive women were working the event. Not just the volunteers and serving staff were gorgeous, but there were strategically placed, sexy go-go dancers and a lovely, extremely flexible acrobat in a flimsy outfit doing some interesting contortions inside a transparent plastic bubble.

That's Kelsey on the right

It makes sense of course, as these events are primarily for the purpose of fundraising. If you can't get them with pathos, why not try lust, and it certainly can't hurt to combine the two.

I sure had fun. Given the very good work done by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is one of the few major Jewish groups in Canada that hasn't succumbed to the infection of vapid moral relativism promoted by halfwits like those at JSpace, I was pleased to be there, for all the aforementioned reasons.

The best of all possible worlds: delicious cake dispensed by delectable women

Toronto Sun's Sue-Ann Levy makes the communist pinheads at rabble.ca explode

You know you're doing a good job when you've written something that makes the communist pinheads at rabble.ca become apoplectic:

"Sue-Ann Levy, the perpetually grotesque enemy of working people that the Toronto Sun pays good money to run down those who actually work for a living, penned an opinion piece recently spouting the Canadian Taxpayers Federation line that Ontario government employees are somehow abusing the system by calling in sick more than do their private sector counterparts.

She spouts a bunch of statistics that, hopefully correctly, show that workers who are able to, do in fact call in sick, though she frames this, of course, as workers somehow "shirking" work because the government or unions "let them"."

and here's Sue Ann's article in THE TORONTO SUN 

rabble.ca is almost completely paid for by the big public service unions. Not quite the "independent" media they claim to be.

We live in a time of the most corrupt, incompetent provincial government in Ontario`s history

It would be hard to imagine a report more damaging to the credibility of Ontario's Liberal government than the one released Tuesday by Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk on its decision to cancel the Oakville gas plant.

First under former premier Dalton McGuinty, and later, under Premier Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals estimated the cost of cancelling this plant was $40 million.

Lysyk found it will cost up to $1.112 billion, with the most likely final figure being $815 million, after future savings and cost add-ons are factored in.

Even more devastating to Liberal credibility, Lysyk found that despite McGuinty's insistence he had no idea of the costs of cancelling the Oakville plant, his office was directly responsible for decisions that dramatically increased those costs.

"On cancelling the Oakville plant, the Premier's Office assured TCE (TransCanada Energy Ltd.) that it would be compensated for the full financial value of its contract for the Oakville plant," Lysyk found, "instead of relying on protections in that contract that could have minimized the damages paid to the builder following cancellation."

In other words, the Liberals were so desperate to cancel the politically unpopular Oakville plant leading up to the 2011 election, they wasted hundreds of millions of public dollars in order to do so.

More HERE 

Ontario's Elementary School Teachers Union wants more children to be like the "genderless baby"

Don't you feel lucky to be living in Ontario, where the radical Elementary Teachers Federation published an article by the father of the notorious "genderless baby" advocating for more of the same in public schools?

"I work at City View Alternative Senior School in Toronto’s west end, a grade 7 and 8 school where the provincial curriculum is taught through the lens of social justice. Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, power, and oppression are all integrated as the content material in many of the classes, along with an emphasis on activism and the need to do something to change the world rather than simply discuss it.

So it’s probably not surprising that one or more of our students began mucking with the signs on our washroom doors. A sketch of a pair of pants was taped on top of the skirt. A slip of paper that read “Not all girls wear dresses” appeared. And on the boys’ door: “Some boys wear skirts.”  "

SOCIALIST STUDIES has more

This week in deranged evil from the Toronto District School Board

The blog Socialist Studies is keeping an eye on the appalling abuses that routinely occur in Toronto's tax-funded public school system.

This week alone, the items include:

• One school endorsing a Holocaust-denying, 9/11 conspiracy theory promoting website and calling Canada's Prime Minister Harper a "fascist" 

• The TDSB promoting cross-dressing and gender switching to children as young as kindergarten age   More on that Here

• A high school named after the greatest opponent of Communism in the 20th Century promoting the communist totalitarian murderer Che Guevara.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg and is part of a huge file that suggests the leadership of the Toronto District School Board should be purged immediately. If the Ontario Public School System system and curriculum are not completely overhauled, these types of travesties will continue and get worse.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford: “If you don’t want to vote Conservative, vote NDP. We cannot reward these Liberals with this corrupt behaviour, enough is enough."

During a stop in Scarborough Tuesday, Ford said that voting Liberal was like “just giving a bank robber another gun and saying, ‘Go rob another bank.’”

There are 5 by-elections in Ontario today.

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Provincial Liberal candidate Milczyn enraged by Ford support for Doug Holyday

...Milczyn — a member of Ford’s executive committee — confirmed Monday he is firing back at the mayor and “his political machine” who have entered the byelection “in a very unusual way.”

“They have endorsed Holyday, made media statements in his support, campaigned for him and attended his public events — this is not typical behaviour for a mayor,” Milczyn said in an e-mail statement to the Toronto Sun.

“The Fords have made this byelection about themselves, and are attempting to use this vote for their own personal validation.

Ford's full support for Doug Holyday comes as no surprise. When I interviewed Rob Ford while he was running for mayor in 2010, I asked him who he admired  most in politics and next to his father, who was a Progressive Conservative MPP, Doug Holyday was the man for whom the then candidate expressed the most admiration.

Misuse of taxpayer funds and total incompetence - welcome to Kathleen Wynne's Ontario

Michael Coren on The Levin Factor

Yesterday evening, I was discussing some of the aspects of the proposed Ontario Sex Education curriculum with a friend who is a mother of a 13 year old boy. I mentioned a couple of the subjects that Kathleen Wynne and Ben Levin, her Deputy Minister of Education who was arrested on child pornography charges this week, wanted introduced.

This woman, who has immaculate credentials as a "progressive leftist," was appalled that I even mentioned the subject titles around her 13 year-old. I did it with with no further information other than the titles and mentioned far less salacious ones than Michael Coren did in his article in Today's Toronto Sun linked below.

The point is, if just describing the actual subjects scandalized a liberal-minded parent of a child two years older than the age at which Wynne and Levin wanted to teach such graphic sexual material, imagine how disturbing it would be to parents for their pre-pubescent children to get the full, hard-core indoctrination.

Michael Coren's article The Levin Factor in Today's Toronto Sun provides important facts about the agenda that Kathleen Wynne and the institution where Ben Levin was a senior academic, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), wanted to impose on public school children in Ontario.

"...tremendously unsettling is that Levin was a major player in an educational establishment that gave us 2010’s radical and extreme sex education curriculum; it was postponed due to public pressure, but Premier Wynne has promised to reintroduce it.

The sex education program in question proposed that 11-year-olds focus on gender identity, homophobia, personal satisfaction and learning about their bodies through masturbation and vaginal lubrication."

N.B. The very first time I appeared on Michael's show The Arena on the Sun News Network, almost two years ago, it was to draw attention to the deplorable approach to education being taken by OISE.

Hopefully, the one positive thing that will come from the events of this week is that people concerned about the state of affairs in education will finally take notice and push for the University of Toronto to clean house there.

Toronto Mayor Ford's statement on the slimy, lying, incompetent government of Kathleen Wynne

Kathleen Wynne's government "told me to raise taxes on the backs of hard working Torontonians"

Incompetent Ontario Premier Wynne set to punish Toronto for electing Rob Ford

...[Kathleen Wynne's] government plans to make up the cash it needs to sustain the Sunshine List lifestyle the public sector is accustomed to.

Within seconds of seeing this disgraceful sight came word from the provincial government that it will be cutting Toronto’s funding thanks to their incompetent money management.

But it was more of a direct shot at Mayor Rob Ford personally — on the backs of Torontonians but designed to hurt his chances of re-election.

The message was made disgracefully clear by, in essence, sending the message, “So you want to be fiscally prudent, eh, fat boy? Watch this.”

Kathleen McWynnty offers Ontario a new face but the same old lies and corruption

More HERE

How Ontario's Liberals ripped off taxpayers for $585 Million

Media piling-on is building sympathy for Rob Ford

"I don't like Ford, but he was elected and this is a ridiculous distraction. They need to let him do his job."

That was something a very liberal ex-girlfriend said to me on the phone last night about the media histrionics over Rob and Doug Ford's alleged, unsubstantiated misdeeds. And it's something that in one form or another, I'm hearing more and more from people in Toronto.

"They're digging stuff up from 30 years ago about one of them that has nothing to do with how he's performing as a Councillor. That's just vindictive,"  she added.

Comments like that are good news for the Fords and bad news for the media with an ax to grind against him.    The anti-Ford Toronto media have accomplished something that would have seemed highly improbable to many two years ago.They are actually evoking sympathy for the Fords from people who used to find them thoroughly unappealing.

There are people who hated the Fords before they were winners in the 2010 municipal elections. So the current round of scandal-mongering by The Star and Globe and Mail serves as bias confirmation. But I've heard from neighbors, readers, and sometimes random strangers who say in essence what my ex-girlfriend said.

One neighbor confided to me earlier in the week:

"I didn't vote for Ford but I think he's doing a pretty good job for the city and it's disgusting the way the media is going after him over these personal things that have nothing to do with how he's running the city. I'm going to vote for him next time."

There's actually a lot of that going on.

What should be of even greater frustration to the anti-Ford rabble is what was then disclosed to me by this neighbor, whom, like The Star and Globe do with their Ford stories, I will use as an anonymous source.

 "Don't tell anyone I told you that."

It was not the first time someone has said to me about their new affinity for Rob Ford.

It also suggests a potential factor that is very interesting. It means that polls The Toronto Star has taken presuming Olivia Chow could beat Ford in an election, which on the surface seem like they were only culled from a three bloc radius of the Annex neighborhood in downtown Toronto, could be totally misleading.

Part of the problem for The Toronto Star and Globe is that people aren't as stupid and gullible as they would like them to be.

It's a good thing we have The Star and Globe to tell us the city is falling apart because of the Fords and that they must resign immediately. Otherwise, to the average citizen casually observing, it would seem like everything is just fine on the streets of Toronto. And should anyone actually bother to go to City Hall, where they would  see civic government is functioning as efficiently as it ever has, the only thing they would see falling apart is The Toronto Star's credibility.

In essence, The Star and Globe want to pull an undemocratic coup in Toronto. They want a democratically elected mayor removed by an administrative process initiated by the Premier. A Premier, it needs to be said, who has been afraid to call an election since she was appointed by a political party to helm the province.

The Star and Globe are doing their best to whip up a fake storm of hysteria to make that happen. They raise a fury about some unproven, unattributed allegations, then say the "crisis"  they are the only ones obsessed with is rendering the city in chaos.

To that, there's a simple way of proving them wrong. What exactly is not being done that should be by Toronto's municipal government in the midst of this fraudulent chaos they allege?  Where exactly is this "chaos" and how is affecting any citizen of the city who isn't dealing directly with reporters?

Funny how that question never gets answered or even asked by The Toronto Star or Globe and Mail.

Our province's less-than-reputable Premier, Kathleen Wynne, has her own scandal controversy. She was part of the gas plant cancellation scam that effectively stole over half a billion dollars from Ontario taxpayers.

It`s no wonder she was happy to get in on the circus act the media pitched around Rob Ford.

She alluded to the possibility that her government might have to step in to deal with the media-manufactured crisis that is not actually a crisis for anyone outside the media.

Wynne's motives were pathetically transparent. She was thrilled to be exploiting a diversion from the corruption of her own government. There was an added benefit in that her political advisers are telling her that the fiscally conservative Ford's woes are hurting the brand of her rivals, Tim Hudak's Progressive Conservatives.

The motives for The Star and Globe are also transparent.  They saw this as a chance to get rid of a politician they despise. And even if they fail, nothing sells newspapers better than controversy, even one that sinks to new lows in journalistic standards.

But there are plenty of people not obsessed with municipal politics, and just because the local media smells blood in the water and has gone into a feeding frenzy doesn`t mean the rest of the city is joining them.

I was standing on a subway last weekend speaking with a very attractive brunette woman with whom I am acquainted. Normally, I try to avoid political conversations in crowded, confined public spaces, but the woman I was with, who lives outside Toronto, asked some questions about the Ford controversy.

The subject of unions came up, since some of the most vociferous opposition to Ford comes from the bosses of public sector unions, whom Ford has stood up to, in stark contrast to his predecessor as mayor, David Miller. Speaking from the experience of having worked as a unionized civil servant for over a decade, I said, "if you ever want to find the worst employee on the floor, just look for the union streward, and that'll be the one."

A small chuckle came from the seat by where we stood, and there sat a middle aged workman, a salt-of-the earth type, who had been listening in on our conversation. I was expecting to get a lecture on the importance of unions. Instead, he turned to my companion, smiled and said, "he`s right."

"I've been in the union nineteen years," he continued "the union chiefs only care about themselves and use their positions so they don't have to work as hard as the rest of us."

The subject soon shifted back to Ford and the media vendetta. Our fellow subway rider volunteered what has become a familiar strain from a lot of Torontonians lately, "I never liked Ford when I first heard about him, but he's been doing an okay job as mayor. They're going after him about personal stuff that's irrelevant to how he's doing his job. It smells bad and I'm probably going to vote for him next time."

Not for the first time, The Toronto Star may have made a serious miscalculation when it comes to Rob Ford. There are plenty of people in Toronto who hate Ford and would never vote for him under any circumstance. Those people are happy to have their prejudices fed by The Star`s reports.

But there are a big pool of people in the middle on the subject of Ford. And for every voter The Star is turning away from him, their hysterical bullying of Toronto`s mayor may be driving even more to support Rob Ford.


UPDATE: New poll indicates public confidence in Toronto's media has taken a major hit because of the smear campaign against Ford