I have just confirmed the visit for the University of British Columbia (UBC) and University of Toronto (UT).
Both of these schools visited us last year. They came on short notice and met with a group of IB students that had already applied. This year I hope to have a larger group for them.
If you are interested in either of these schools or if you are interested in Canada in general sign up for this event when the time comes.
Canada’s upper chamber, the Senate, may yet save the day for Canadians on bill C-6, which is essentially a repackaging of Bills C-51 and C-52 that generated such outrage among Canadians last year for their attempt to impose Codex-style pharmaceutical fascism on the supplement industry — reclassifying common herbs and foods as prescription drugs — the usual Codex stuff. Here’s an excerpt from Helke Ferrie’s report on the status of Bill C-6 as published in the October issue of Vitality magazine. It seems there’s still hope, if the Senators block the bill. Health advocates have been sending letters and emails to Senators all summer so there should be little doubt as to how “the people” feel about this issue:
“On April 30, 2009, all four parties supported Bill C-6 without protest. True, MP Paul Szabo (Liberal, Mississauga North) and MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis (NDP, Winnipeg North) wanted assurances that C-6, to amend the Hazardous Products Act, would not affect regulation of natural health products. Judy Wasylycia-Leis reminded parliamentarians: “The furor that erupted after the introduction of Bill C-51 [to amend food and drugs regulation] and C-52 [the former version of C-6] last year was a result of the fact that the government failed to consider the need to clearly differentiate natural health products from current drug legislation.”
Indeed, the pernicious fact is that C-51, C-52, and C-6 share regulatory provisions that were and are constitutionally insupportable and make a mockery of current medical and environmental science.
The Conservatives promised that C-6 has nothing to do with natural health products, pointing to Clause 4 (1). What they didn’t say, and what the Opposition failed to recognize, is that if C-6 were to become law, any sort of consequential amendment to food and drugs legislation could be made, and that this could happen by a mere Order in Council, without any parliamentary debate. Nobody would know. This extraordinary power is written into Bill C-6, which also is explicitly exempted from the mandatory requirements of the Statutory Instruments Act, against which all Bills must be checked to ensure that they are in harmony with the Constitution. The authors of C-6 must know why they did that. Tested for its constitutionality, C-6 would not survive.
Parliamentarians went into summer recess assured that C-6 aims to protect Canadians from terrible poisons hidden in dangerous imports arriving from various foreign countries. Nobody even thought of asking why this Bill was exempt from being checked against the Constitution. Not one MP wondered why C-6 has these extraordinary powers that would make a judge’s jaw drop. C-6 was sent off to the Senate. Having been approved by all parties, Harper & Co thought it unlikely to raise Senatorial hackles. The fact that this toxic products Bill is itself toxic to the rule of law, human rights, and our Constitution never surfaced at all in parliamentary debate. Parliament had been successfully bamboozled, misled, or was complicit.
If I had my way, every MP would have to pass, with at least 80% success, an exam in Canadian constitutional and international human rights law as a mandatory prerequisite to run for office. The examination results would be posted on the Internet and the major newspapers. Imagine the dazzling intellectual wattage that would illuminate our parliament as a result of this one precautionary measure!
Latest Developments in the Bill C-6 Battle
If you want something done in Canada, you do it in the winter. If you want to prevent something from being done, you do it in the summer. This tactic has worked for Liberals and Conservatives alike for at least a century. Therefore, Manitoba’s Senator Sharon Carstairs’ surprising move on June 23 to adjourn second reading of C-6 until September could at first be understood as summertime having arrived in Canada and that the living was easier without debating Bills. However, knowing her thoughtful work in the late 1990’s, which made public the antiquated, inhumane policies that dictated chronic pain management, I suspect her decision to have C-6 discussed in the fall was based on her correct assessment of its assault on human rights.
C-6 was tabled in the Senate on September 16. Over the summer, determined and coordinated action by various health freedom groups resulted in each Senator receiving at least 600 e-mails or letters from across Canada protesting this Bill on the issue of its unconstitutionality. Having waded through the moral and legal morass of Bills C-51 and C-52 last year, this campaign went to the very heart of the matter: the loss of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms which were snuck into a Bill under the guise of protecting public health. By the time the Senators met to discuss C-6, they had read the Bill, its legal analysis, and got an earful from Canadians. The result: the Senators were furious.
The last time that happened, about a decade ago, a public inquiry was the result of their outrage. They subpoenaed those now internationally famous “rogue” scientists from Health Canada (Drs. Shiv Chopra, Margret Haydon and Gerard Lambert) who had consistently fought the governments of Prime Ministers Mulroney (Conservative) and Chretien (Liberal) for disregarding published science and safety requirements of the Food and Drugs Act, and for knowingly passing into our food and pharmacies drugs that cause cancer, liver failure, hormone disruption, systemic disease, birth defects, and central nervous system injury. As payback for their audacity in testifying before the Senate, those scientists were fired by the next Prime Minister, Paul Martin (Liberal).
In 1999, bovine growth hormone and other killer drugs investigated by that Senate inquiry were subsequently banned in Canada and the rest of the world. But many more such scientifically and legally insupportable or unsupported drugs are still killing and maiming Canadians (in fact, at least 23,000 people annually) according to the Canadian Medical Association.
NATURAL HEALTH PRODUCTS UNDER SIEGE
Meanwhile, the natural health products (NHP) which kill nobody and often cure, continue to be under attack in blatantly illegal ways – including recent raids at gunpoint. Over the past 6 months, the Canadian Coalition for Health Freedom has provided to the Senate documented case histories of these assaults on natural health product distributors. This is highly significant because Health Canada is acting already as if C-6 was in place, and as if consequential amendments had already been made to the Food and Drugs Act. Passing C-6 would legalize Health Canada’s now out-of-control behaviour….”
Read the whole report in Vitality’s online edition. There lots more to this.
Voici une succincte présentation de la cave où je vais hiverner.
on commence par ouvrir une porte et descendre des escaliers vers le sous-sol qui à ma grande surprise st quand même lumineux. Oui il y a des fenêstrous (c un mots qui n’existe pas dans le dico mais ma grand-mère l’utilise donc en quelque sorte je lui rend hommage) qui donne à la hauteur du gazon. Puis en bas il y a une sorte de “salle TV” avec le câble s’il vous plait. Cette “salle TV avec deux Canapé ” d’un style sobre et modeste (IKEA tu me manques) donne sur une chambre spacieuse déja prise par un autre ( le saligaud) mais son placard c’est sous les escalier avec le chauffe-eau et un fil comme porte fringues et donne sur la laverie de la maison à partager avec tous ces habitants ( et oui les habitants du ss sol en fond partis). Puis vient deux petites chambre de 8m*m et 7m*m, la salle à manger et enfin la cuisine et la salle de bain (avec une douche donc à partir de maintenant on l’apellera la salle à douche). Ce qui est marrant c’est que la laverie fait à peu près deux fois et demi ma chambre mais il n’y a pas de fenêtre. Voici des images:
la salle TV et son fenêstrous
Le “Space”
La 2.5x space laverie
La salle TV avec sa tv qui a depuis été remplacé par une tv 2nd génération (couleur et HP intégré) on distingue aussi un lampe qui ne marche pas et untas de feuille pour faire du feu ainsi qu’un brasseur d’air dans le couloir (l’humidité dans les caves est un réel problème public ici au canada et mon loueur a été choisi pour tester ce matériel à la pointe de la technologie)
La 7m*m bedroom à qui j’ai pris la commode et le store et lui est refilé une commode et un store casé. Par contre le bureau de mioche “brisé” (ici au Québec sa veut dire casé) je lui est laissé. Pour l’instant, personne n’a choisit de résider dans cette pièce. Mais depuis aussi bizarre que cela puisse paraitre quelqu’un a accepté. Et cette personne fut une femelle. Avec mon colloc Marc-André on a donc parié sur sa couleur de cheveux et voici ma théorie. Elle ne peut que être blonde:
argument 1: la chambre est pourris donc elle est blonde pour accepter
argument 2: elle a un mois de retard par rapport à tous le monde donc seul une blonde pour avoir un mois de retard.
le paris fut donc un pack de 24 bières (soit 22-36$ selon les marques) avec deux possibilités soit elle est blonde ou brune et le perdant doit payer son Pack. Soit elle est autre chose et les deux perdants doivent payer leurs Packs. On laisse à notre nouvelle colonisatrice la charge de définir elle même sa couleur de cheveux.
rq: même si ici au Québec les blonde sont plus rare je prenais très peu de risque.
Résultat: elle se déclara châtain et tous le monde fini heureux.
Anecdote: il m’a fallu une semaine avant de la croisé dans la cave ou notre sous-sol car nous n’avions pas les même horaire de lever et de coucher.
revenons à la visite de la cave sous-sol: pour rappel il reste ma chambre la cuisine la salle à manger et stocker le nourriture et enfin la salle de douche.
Voici ma 8m*m mais au moins j’ai plein de meuble et un mur du fond en brique.
Mon fenêstrous
La salle à manger
L’espace pour stocker la nourriture
La CuisinetteLa salle à douche
What can I say? They are maps. I imagine by now they are slightly out of date.
I have seen so many cool projects made from vintage maps recently. I am sure someone will do wonders with these.
Please don’t use them to navigate, or at least, if you do, please don’t blame me if you drive down a dead end street or over a no-longer-existent bridge!
(All three maps are from the 1970s…)
One Person’s Junk… During the month of October, I will be giving away one teeny-tiny item every weekday. For more details, click here. To enter, just leave a comment below.
NOTE: Unfortunately, due to the highly sensitive nature of some of the information in my motivational statement, I have only included the first half of my entry as well as slightly modifying some of the details. Please refer to my online submission for the complete motivational statement. Sorry and thanks for understanding.
A life-altering journey will soon be irreversibly set in motion. I will be married to my beautiful fiancée, yet we will not have a home. Our plan is to leave our jobs for at least one year. We will embark on a mission to seek out social change taking place in our global community, aspiring to be students of cultures, economies, philosophies, politics and history.
Our goal is to be temporary residents – not tourists – to more deeply integrate into societies and we relish the opportunity to be enablers of social change along the way. We hope to investigate things such as working on an organic farm, exploring the context of those in extreme poverty, consulting with entrepreneurs, while possessing flexibility to jump on a plane and assist with relief efforts.
This is not a solitary journey but rather, the journey of a community. The guests at our wedding will provide social issues and destinations they would like us to explore, perhaps even meeting us there, while we aim to redistribute our wedding gifts along the way, creating direct linkages between our friends with individuals abroad. We believe Kiva is the perfect conduit to channel our funds into local communities in a relevant and sustainable manner. Inevitably, with knowledge comes responsibility, and our hope is that this journey will grow in all of us a high value of humanity and develop a snowball of engagement with our global community.
While our goal is simply to learn and our hope is to be changed, my long-term dream is to be a social entrepreneur. This trajectory has been increasingly apparent.
A blogger on a wedding site I frequent just posted this Marie Claire article. It’s appalling. The author wants to address the issue of ‘Asian trophy wives’ who marry older white rich men…but she also deals with Asian women in general who enter into relationships with white men.
It assumes white men are fetish predators and Asian women are passive (and materialistic). It fails to acknowledge the multitude of same-race May-December romances in society, and the article mistakenly attempts to show these relationships as a new ‘trend’ although many of the partners (Woody Allen-Soon Yi Previn, Rupert Murdoch-Wendi Deng) are hardly new news.
Of course on a personal level it also disturbs me that the multitude of WM-AF couples I count as close friends are so carelessly disregarded as white male fetishes of passive unthinking females.
I guess I’m especially disappointed to see this coming from a North American context. It’s common in Korea to hear such rubbish as Korean women are still disparaged for dating foreign men. Some female friends have been called whores or traitors for dating outside the perceived cultural and racial boundaries (justified by citing cases of women who became pregnant by departing American soldiers). There is also a group of Koreans…not to be named here…who stalk white men they suspect of doing drugs, teaching children outside of regular classroom hours, and gasp…..dating Korean women. The implication here is that Korean women are being blindly conned by white men into having sex to feed the fetishes of outsiders.
Are there white men with an Asian fetish? Hell yes. Are there Korean women with a white fetish? Hell yes. I’ve seen the sexually explicit notes female university students write their white male professors (who everyone knows are married). I know of men pursued by older female students despite explicitly stating time and time again that they have a wife and child at home. I know of Korean girls who sign up for English academy classes because they want their own trophy boyfriend or at least a ‘unique’ experience to brag about. But there are many more white-white, black-black, Asian-Asian one night stands, affairs, and trophy marriages. Furthermore ‘white’ and ‘Asian’ are ridiculously enormous categories. Are Vietnamese women really the same as Japanese women? Can we categorize Russian, British, South African, Serbian men into one large mammoth group?
Seriously, the only reason people obsess over biracial hook-ups and relationships is that a) they have racial hang-ups of their own b) with globalization our ranks are growing.
And then there’s the fact that the couples the author mentions are MARRIED couples. They are not fetish-flings. Some are strange…..Woody and Sook-Yi come to mind, but there’s a whole lot of other weirdness going on in that relationship apart from the bi-racial-ness! Perhaps these couples found an initial attraction based on a racial feature, but it takes a lot more than that to stay together, raise a child, and ride through the ups and downs of a long term relationship together (For the record, FI and I initially became attracted to each other based on our mutual love for Arcade Fire and Stars).
And then there’s that other ‘fetish.’ When FI announced to his parents that he was going to marry a white girl, there was definitely opposition. But in the wider world of Korean society we have never experienced discrimination as a bi-racial couple….we encounter wonder. This wonder is never from Korean women – it is always from Korean men – especially older men – who have a white woman fantasy. The relative absence of white women dating or marrying Korean men (or at least the public display of such couples) makes us all that more fantastic.
While bringing the cats home from the vet last week, a talkative taxi driver asked if we were married. When FI explained we were getting married next year, the driver did something I’ve encountered many times – starred at me sitting in the back seat through the rear view mirror, gasped with his mouth open, and then clapped repeatedly while proclaiming congratulations!!!! (All this in the middle of the infamous Seoul traffic!) I have never experienced this reaction by myself. When students/taxi drivers/inquisitive shop owners find out I have a Korean FI they look at me confused…but when I’m with FI and it is ‘confirmed’ that we are indeed a real couple, there is joyful celebration by older Korean men for my FI. This show of congratulation is most certainly reserved for my FI. He has ‘somehow’ managed to ‘catch’ the elusive white girl (who may also have a magical pass to a resident visa in Canada…although FI is less excited about our intended return to Canada in 10-15 years than those around him).
The difference between how our relationship is perceived and accepted by Korean society is striking. I haven’t spent enough time in Canada with my FI to evaluate how Canadian society understands us although a few have hinted that FI must have an underlying motive to move to Canada (usually from the same people who can’t distinguish the South Korean economy from the North Korean economy). It’s fascinating that white women entering into relationships with Asian men are never perceived as oppressed/conned/exploited. There’s a cultural reason/perception for that..but I think that there’s also a gendered reason for that.
On a tellement peu de politiciens charismatiques, et en plus les gens sont tellement désabusés de la politique en général et du scandale des commandites, que la population a préféré, depuis quelques années, élire des gouvernements minoritaires, malgré l’inconvénient majeur d’un type de gouvernement minoritaire, c’est-à-dire d’avoir des élections à répétition.
Mais les choses vont peut-être de changer au cours de la prochaine élection, puisque selon un sondage, 68% des québécois seraient disposés à voter pour un gouvernement majoritaire.
Mais les résultats de ce sondage me laisse plutôt perplexe. En réalité je crois plutôt que la grande majorité des gens en faveur d’un gouvernement majoritaire, vont tout de même voter pour le Bloc Québécois. Ce qui enlève à coup sûr la possibilité d’avoir un gouvernement majoritaire.
