Free Republic

One side-effect of Europe's financial crisis is the rise of fringe parties who want to dump the Euro and maybe the whole European Union. So it's not all bad news. As I've argued before, the EU is artificial because there isn't a "Europe" in the same sense that there's an "America," a "Britain" or even a "Canada." Despite the chronic irritant of Quebec separatism, resurgent Scottish nationalism and the bloody American civil war followed by a century of resentment, words like "un-American," "Remember you're British" or "Canadian values" meant something almost everyone understood even if they didn't agree. No one...

Last Sunday, 50 men, women and children protested on Front Street about an issue that has escaped the attention of most of the world. If there isn’t a massive outcry soon, it could result in a massacre that would remind us of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944. I’m talking about the town of Lyari in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi. Imagine an area smaller than Ajax, yet inhabited by 1.5 million people, most of them working-class poor, cramped in homes separated by alleys little more than three metres wide. Surrounding this dense cluster of humanity is a force of 5,000 para-military...

OTTAWA - A foreign charity that has given millions to Canadian environmental groups has quietly - and retroactively - re-written grant descriptions days after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty warned in his budget the federal government would apply heightened scrutiny to the political activities of charities in this country. "We have modified and added additional content to some grants to reflect progress, lessons learned and achievements," the Geneva-based Oak Foundation said in an April 2 posting at its website. While Oak's description of the changes is vague, researcher and blogger Vivian Krause has written in the Financial Post, "The changes mostly...

We’ve seen this before, and now we are seeing it again. This time it was U.S. President Barack Obama’s quick, unadvertised visit to Afghanistan to sign a partnership deal with President Hamid Karzai, and to assure U.S. troops and all Americans that “there is light on the horizon.” In other words, Obama is all but conceding defeat. We saw it in Vietnam when then-president Richard Nixon assured that the withdrawal of American troops meant “peace with honour” — and America’s South Vietnamese allies were abandoned to the forces of Ho Chi Minh. President Obama promises U.S. forces will mostly be...

Some historians will tell you that Canada really defined itself as a nation 95 years ago, at Vimy Ridge in France. Thousands of young people from across the country are overseas this weekend, getting ready for a hallowed ceremony at the Vimy Ridge memorial to honour the Canadians who mounted a daring battle there during the Great War. On Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, at 5:30 in the morning, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps came together for the first time and stormed the seven-kilometre-wide ridge that had been long held by the Germans, dug in with machine guns....

There are two possible ways to persuade Iran to bend to world pressure and abandon efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Neither solution is guaranteed, but each in different ways has a chance of restoring sanity to that country, whose leadership seems hell-bent on provoking Israel to attack its already extensive nuclear capabilities. As things stand at the moment, an Israeli air attack on Iran’s known nuclear sites seems inevitable. Two things mitigate against success for Israel. It doesn’t have the huge bunker-buster bombs the Americans have, nor the means to deliver the bombs. Apparently, the Israeli bombs on strike aircraft...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Even if President Barack Obama approved the controversial Keystone XL pipeline tomorrow, at least some Canadian oil would still flow to Asia, according to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In a public one-on-one interview here with Jane Harman, head of the Wilson Centre think-tank, Harper said Obama's rejection of the controversial pipeline -- even temporarily -- stressed Canada's need to find other buyers for oilsands crude. And that wouldn't change even if the president's mind did. "Look, the very fact that a 'no' could even be said underscores to our country that we must diversify our energy export...

As the post-mortem of the French-born 23-year-old jihadist of Algerian origin, Mohamed Merah, unfolds in the media alongside the official investigation into his bloody deeds in Toulouse and Montauban, a critical question of strategic importance remains unasked. French authorities knew Merah travelled twice to Pakistan and Afghanistan, spent time in the jihadi-infested tribal region of Waziristan, and there received further indoctrination and training in the use of firearms. Since his return from Pakistan, Merah was under police surveillance, as was his older brother Abdelkader, known for his role in the recruiting of young men for jihad. Moreover, as some investigative...

MATHESON, ONT. - More than $3 million in coins spilled across a northern Ontario highway when a Brinks tractor-trailer crashed early Wednesday, police said. The driver and passenger of the tractor-trailer remain in hospital with life-threatening injuries. At about 4 a.m., the Brinks truck crossed the centre line of Highway 11 and struck a rock face, spilling its cargo of millions in uncirculated Canadian coins. It then caused a chain-reaction of crashes, including a minivan and two other tractor-trailers, one of which left a load of candy strewn on the road, police said. The crash happened south of Ramore, about...

OTTAWA - Conservative senators who question foreign funding for environmental activists have a fight on their hands — launched by the same group that tried to raise cash over Christmas to "Save Santa" as global warming melts the North Pole. The David Suzuki Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from American foundations, has launched an online form letter campaign to "tell the Senate to stop silencing environmental groups." "It's also within our interest to make sure that Canadians are informed about the fact that there's inaccuracies that are being said within the Senate and that we see...

EDITORIAL If it were not the dog days of summer when the Harper government nixed the long-form census nearly 18 months ago, it would not have turned into apocalyptic news similar to the sky is falling. Dog days are usually slow news days -- people on holidays, workaholics going on the wagon, news agencies working with sparse staff -- until something to pounce upon comes along. Toss in the very-public resignation of Statistics Canada chief Munir Sheikh over the scrapping of a mandatory long form, and the media -- us excluded -- went into a frenzy. What has this hell...

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made his most direct sales pitch yet to sell Canada's energy, vowing that "foreign money and influence" will not obstruct his government's goal to sell oil and other natural resources to countries other than just the United States. [clipped] Following up on themes he's developed ever since the the Obama administration delayed a decision on construction of the Keystone pipeline that would take bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to refineries on the U.S. gulf coast, Harper said that decision would not prevent Canada from capitalizing on its resource wealth. "We are an emerging energy superpower," Harper...

If Canada’s “green” media covered the Costa Concordia disaster in Europe the same way they are Europe’s green energy disaster, we’d never have heard of it. That’s because they, along with the federal opposition parties, spent so long shilling for green energy without knowing what they were talking about, the reality of what’s happening is just too embarrassing for them to admit. So they stubbornly ignore the story. But the stories keep coming. To wit: (1) “Solar Subsidy Cuts Sought by German Minister As Demand Wanes” (Bloomberg, Jan. 6): “Clean-energy subsidies should be cut in Germany, the second biggest solar...

Alleged Rwandan war criminal Leon Mugesera played Canada's ponderously slow judicial and immigration systems like a concert violinist, but now he is finally where he should have been more than a decade ago. And that's in Rwanda, and a jail cell in Kigali. We trust his accommodations are suitable. Rwanda, in turn, has promised Canada that Mugesera would get a fair trial on charges that he incited the 1993-94 genocide of millions of the Tutsi minority by marauding Hutu militiamen. Canada, in turn, should promise Canadians to speed up the system to that no alleged war criminal can ever again...

If Canada’s “green” media — especially in the Parliamentary Press Gallery — demanded the same standards of accountability of themselves as they do of politicians, they would be killing entire forests right now apologizing to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Why? Because in sidestepping the economically suicidal stampede onto the green energy bandwagon which they relentlessly shilled for, Harper was right and they — along with the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens — were wrong. Today, so-called “green” energy is in retreat all over the developed world, as taxpayers and consumers in countries that blindly raced into it are in open...

A few days ago I received a letter from a dear friend visiting Vietnam to attend a physics conference in Qui Nhon. My friend is head of the physics department at a Catholic college in upstate New York. Vietnam, he wrote me, is “a country of our heartache, of our youth in many ways.” This is true for our generation that came of age in the years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. We became first aware of politics and then took part in anti-Vietnam War protests during the decade beginning with the U.S. bombings of Hanoi,...

OTTAWA - Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has criticized the United Nations for standing on the sidelines while violence escalates in Syria, including two suicide bomb attacks that killed dozens of people on Friday in Damascus. Baird also announced new sanctions against the repressive regime of Bashar Assad as the death toll from weeks of attacks by security forces and thugs mount just as Arab League observers enter the country to monitor conditions. And he repeated calls for the estimated 5,000 Canadians in the country to leave. "The vice is tightening on Assad ever more as he refuses to heed...

Dear America, You used to be such a nice, smart country, but these days, and we say this as your friends up here in Canada, you seem to be having an emotional breakdown. We first noticed it after you lost your mojo following the global economic crash of 2008. Remember? That was the result of your politicians in the White House and on both sides of the aisle in Congress unleashing a financial tsunami on the world by gutting the regulation of your financial-services sector, dating to the Great Depression, at the behest of Wall Street. That would be the...

Being Jewish never interfered with my enjoyment of Christmas or my love for this time of year. As a child, my parents would seat me outside my dad’s store — Al’s Men’s Wear on Yonge Street — to watch the Santa Claus Parade and it never failed to enchant. Then it would be off with mom to see the Christmas windows at Eaton’s and Simpsons, with their animatronic displays of Santa’s workshop and other winter scenes. Visits to jolly department-store Santas were also part of our annual routine and did not make me feel internally conflicted about being Jewish, or...

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his British counterpart David Cameron both stood up for their respective national interests last week and stared down a host of unelected (and unaccountable) bureaucratic rule makers. In doing so, they confirmed their position in the vanguard of conservative political leadership slowly gathering momentum in the anglophone world. How did they do this? They just said “no.” In Harper’s case, it was the rent seekers and incorrigible do-gooders behind the Kyoto protocols who were given their comeuppance. Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent told Kyoto cheerleaders in Durban that Canada is counting itself out of...