Worth a read

A couple of things caught my attention this week:

First some suit from the RCMP in BC finally got around to apologizing to the families of Pigman Picton’s victims.  About bloody time.  It wasn’t much of an apology as apologies go – there were a lot of weasel words about hindsight and he never actually came out and said “we didn’t take this too seriously because it was just Indian whores that were going missing”.  But it was a start on apologizing.  Maybe the rest of the RCMP brass can take some lessons – between tripping over their dicks on the Picton investigation, tasering that poor immigrant Pole to death and harassing women it seems to me like maybe the RCMP will be doing a lot of apologizing over the next few years.

Today the jury convicted the Shafia family members of murder.  Good call but its about time we had a discussion in this country about what it means to be a Canadian.  We stumble around the edges of the discussion whenever we deport someone or when we have to deal with a Khadr or a Shafia but its high time we started having the conversation when new citizens take the oath of citizenship.  And then we need to follow up by taking the discussion seriously.  We don’t need to pretend that its OK to speak some foreign gibberish in public.  We don’t need to make allowance for cultural diversity as regards clothing or treatment of women or religious practices.  If we want our country to continue in its Judeo Christian WASP heritage of tolerance and (small “L”) liberal values then we need to stand up and tell every citizen that they actually matter.  And for the ones that don’t toe the line we need to chuck them out of the country or into jail PDQ.