Tag Archives: Quebec

Conservative Party of Canada wins two seats in by-elections

Congratulations to our conservative neighbors to the North!

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives pulled off an amazing political upset in federal by-elections Monday night, stealing a rural Quebec stronghold seat from the Bloc Quebecois.

The Conservatives also reclaimed a traditionally Tory seat in Nova Scotia, ultimately winning two of the four by-elections held Monday.

The results suggest the minority Conservative government’s political fortunes are undimmed by the recession and far stronger than expected in Quebec.

Let’s compare results:

Montmagny – L’Islet – Kamouraska – Rivière-du-Loup (Quebec)

2008:

  • Bloc Quebecois 20,494
  • Conservative 13,640
  • Liberal 6,835
  • New Democrat 2,428

2009:

  • Conservative 12,162
  • Bloc Quebecois 10,737
  • Liberal 3,768
  • New Democrat 1,363

Cumberland – Colchester – Musquodoboit Valley (Nova Scotia)

2008:

  • Independent 27,303
  • New Democrat 4,874
  • Conservative 3,493
  • Liberal 3,344

2009:

  • Conservative 11,167
  • New Democrat 6,267
  • Liberal 5,193

So, now the Conservatives have 145 of 308 ridings. Closer and closer to a majority.

Aside: why is it so freezing these days?

But I also note that October 2009 was our 3rd coldest in 115 years. Canadian readers: please keep the cold up there, we don’t want any of that down here. But if you could have Stephen Harper visit Washington more often, and perhaps give the ACORN lawyer some advice on how to run a country without bankrupting it, that would be OK with us.

Australia: same deal. We want John Howard to visit us. But keep your record cold October to yourself.

Members of Canadian socialist parties oppose child sex-trafficking crime bill

Here is the story from the Winnipeg Free Press. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Manitoba MP Joy Smith’s quest to have child sex traffickers hit with mandatory minimum sentences survived a challenge Tuesday when a Bloc Québécois amendment to her bill was defeated.

[…]The legislation creates a new offence for trafficking of people under 18 and sets five years as the mandatory minimum sentence upon conviction. The bill sets six years as the minimum sentence for trafficking minors with aggravating factors such as sexual assault.

Currently convictions of human trafficking don’t separate victims by age. The maximum sentence is 14 years (life with aggravating factors) but there is no minimum.

Smith says too many convictions under the law since it came into effect almost five years ago have seen sentences far shorter than five years.

Joy Smith is a Conservative Party MP. Here is the roll call of people who voted against protecting children from sexual predators. 46 MPs from the two socialist parties (the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democrat Party) voted against the bill. The NDP is the English socialist part of Canada, and the Bloc Quebecois is the French socialist party of Canada.

Socialists receive lots of votes from criminals and are generally soft on crime, because they believe that law-abiding victims of crime are actually responsible for criminal behavior, and that criminals are the real victims of crime. That is how people on the left think. Good is evil. Evil is good. Does this remind anyone of the ACORN story?

Conservative MP introduces pro-life petition

In other news, Andrew notifies me that my favorite Canadian MP, Maurice Vellacott, has recently introduced a petition to recognize that abortion causes pain to unborn children.

Excerpt:

Liberal MP Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine) this week put forward a petition calling on the government to adopt effective animal welfare legislation because of the fact that animals feel pain and suffering.

In response, pro-life Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott noted before Parliament that preborn human children also experience pain. However, this fact is not recognized in Canadian law, which allows for legal abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

Presenting his own petition, Vellacott (Saskatoon-Wanuskewin) stated, “Mr. Speaker, as a follow up to that series of petitions in respect of the pain that animals feel and in view of the fact that babies in the womb for the entire nine months feel some considerable pain caused by the abortion procedures that are used in this country, these petitioners in the country of Canada note that in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms everyone has a right to life, freedom from pain and freedom from the kind of assault fetuses experience in the womb…”

Again, the left-wing Liberal Party MP is terribly concerned about animal pain, but not concerned at all about allowing innocent unborn children to be killed. On the other hand, Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott is a solid social and fiscal conservative. He is especially active on men’s rights issues like shared parenting. He has an earned doctorate from Trinity International University in Chicago.

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Quebec forces homeschoolers to teach moral relativism and religious pluralism

Story from the National Post. (H/T Canbuhay)

Excerpt:

In a recent troubling judgment (Lavallee vs. Commission scolaire des Chenes), Quebec’s Superior Court ruled that parents do not have ultimate authority over the moral or religious education of their children, and that the state can impose a curriculum that conflicts with the moral codes parents strive to instill. The court rejected a claim brought by parents seeking to exempt their children from the “Ethics and Religious Culture” (ERC) course, which in 2008 became mandatory for all students from Grade 1 to Grade 11, including students in private religious schools.

[…][The province maintains, and the court accepted, that parents’ constitutional freedoms remain intact since they are still free to instruct their children in their own moral codes in the privacy of home. But even homeschoolers, who frequently opt out of government schooling precisely because they prefer to instruct their children in their own belief systems, will be required to teach the “even-handed” ERC course or an equivalent course. Imagine parents instructing their children about the importance of adhering to their own religious beliefs in the morning, then telling them that there are a dozen other religions to choose from, all equally valid, in the afternoon. It’s ludicrous for the province to argue that such a process respects freedom of belief.

This is exactly the problem I have with some fundamentalists who don’t see the need to raise their children to have an impact on the world as a whole. I don’t think that the secularists are going to leave Christians alone, so as a matter of self-defense, we need to be the best in our fields in order to have an influence at the highest levels.

Many of the most ambitious people tend to be rabidly secular because they are usually the people who are least likely to want to give up their autonomy to the demands of the moral law. The higher they rise, the less they respect any external restrictions on their selfish pursuit of pleasure.

It’s natural for influential non-Christians to use the law and the public schools to suppress things that seem to limit their autonomy and pursuit of happiness, such as free speech, parental rights, etc. It annoys them when we disagree with them, and that we teach our children things they don’t believe.

Rather than having a live and let live attitude, they are not at all shy about using the law and the public schools to attack our basic human rights. In order to prevent that, we need to make sure that Christians are in position where they can defend human rights for ourselves, and everyone.