From AFP:

Canada’s first right-wing 24-hour television news network was launched Monday promising to shake up Canadians’ views on politics and the day’s events.

But the Quebecor-owned Sun News Network assailed by critics as “Fox News North” continues to suffer from staffing slip-ups and still has not sorted out its distribution.

The specialty channel aims to “challenge the English Canadian TV news establishment,” Quebec media mogul Pierre Karl Peladeau said last year when he unveiled plans for the network.

“Far too many Canadians are tuning out completely or changing their dials to American all-news channels,” he said. “Quebecor sees an untapped market opportunity in English Canadian TV news.”

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In his cautionary letter to Ann Coulter before her recently scheduled speech at the University of Ottawa, the institution’s provost, Francois Houle, explained that: “Our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or ‘free speech’) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States.”

Canada’s laws also seem to “delineate” medical quackery and fraud somewhat differently from those in the United States. To wit: this very University of Ottawa, so hyper-sensitive to human rights and so vigilant against ethnic sensibilities that it proscribes Bing Crosby’s lines from Road to Morocco is also a long-time partner with Fidel Castro’s Stalinist regime.

In 1999 this chummy partnership between Canadian academics and Castroite apparatchiks gave fruit to the first vaccination against Meningitis B, or so we’re told by “news” agencies that have earned Havana bureaus, and spokeshumans from the University of Ottowa, who co-owns the patent with Fidel Castro’s henchmen.

“Cuba has developed the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine which is available in Third World countries but not in Europe or in the United States due to U.S. sanctions,” dutifully reported Anthony Boadle from Reuters’ Havana bureau right after Sicko’s first screening (oddly good timing for such a “scoop” by a Castro-sanctioned “news” agency, I’d certainly say!) (more…)

Mark Steyn, at NRO, has this to say about Ann Coulter’s recent Kafkaesque experience in Canada:

A couple of days ago, I mentioned François Houle, the leftist apparatchik and provost of the University of Ottawa who threatened Ann Coulter with criminal prosecution before she’d even set foot on Canadian soil.

M. Houle warned Miss Coulter not to “promote hatred.” As this young lady points out in her report from the university, the only hate-promoter here is the buffoon Houle, whose barely veiled threats led to a gang of menacing Houligans (le mot juste) getting the event closed down. Alliances between the state’s ideological commissars and street mobs are a familiar feature of certain kinds of societies, and I suppose Canada will soon get used to its membership of this unlovely club. Ann Coulter says of her experience in the Great White North: (more…)

U.S. Air Force Nurse, Lucy Lehker, comforts an ‘unknown’ Canadian soldier after he was badly wounded in Afghanistan.

Dear Michael Yon,

Today we were sent your story of February 14, 2010. The “unknown” Canadian is our son Danny.  He is a 23-year-old soldier from Vancouver, Canada.

Your photographs were extraordinary and have impacted so many people here in Canada. There has been an outpouring of affection for the Americans who helped Danny in his moment of need.  For that, we thank you for recording these acts of kindness into history.

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The worldwide population of polar bears has doubled in the past thirty years. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the gist of a report by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released on January 30, 2008:

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s.  A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.”

Better yet, let’s listen to a scientist who has been studying polar bears for the past thirty years, both as an academic and as the Canadian government’s director of wildlife research in its most important polar bear habitat, and who is widely regarded as the world’s top authority on the creatures. Here’s Canadian scientist Dr. Mitchell Taylor’s take on the matter: (more…)

California has long had the reputation of being trend-setter to the nation. The Golden State was practicing Obamanomics back when Barack was still called Barry. And now its ways are catching up to it like a hard partier who looks in the mirror one day and sees the portrait of Dorian Gray staring back at him.

Get ready America: California’s unsustainable path is echoed by the federal government. One will crash before the other, giving us all a preview of things to come.

Part of what is slowly destroying California is its move from a land of plenty to a land of locusts. The state taxes and regulates resident companies to such an extreme extent it has driven many of them, and many tax-paying citizens, to other states. For decades California was a place to migrate to. Now it’s suffering an exodus. The fault lies in a political shift from being a conservative, low- tax state to a statist, high-tax nanny state. Californians used to be the freest people in the United States and the world, and now? Not so much. (more…)

Back when George W. “Miss Me Yet?” Bush was President, liberals exercised their right of free speech ad naseum to complain about how Bush was taking away their right of free speech. So you might expect that a liberal or two would express at least a little concern when freedom of expression in the western world is threatened in reality, instead of in theory. After all it’s happened just across the border in Canada and it’s happening right now, just across the pond in the Netherlands.

Try searching MSNBC or the Daily Kos for information about the Geert Wilders trial. Find anything? Me neither. Democratic Undergound, to their credit, did run a version of the story, although the fact that it was Al Jazeera’s version is disappointing, if predictable. A commenter or two even dared to suggest that perhaps Wilders should be free to criticize any religion he wants, including Islam. That kind of heresy was, of course, quickly slapped down with replies like this one:

It’s informative that your ideological hostility, towards major religions, leads you to sympathize with this rightwing European xenophobe: the fact, however, that you can patch his anti-Islamic rants into your own simplistic worldview, does not really qualify as evidence that Wilders is “on trial for telling the truth.” He is on trial because a court decided his remarks might violate the criminal law against incitement to hatred. (more…)