June in Kenora

Blogger Laurence Hunt sends some pictures of Northern Ontario after a month of sunshine and rain. It looks splendid: The Kenora Palette.

Premier McGuinty: Ontario will protect its northern forests

Dalton McGuinty will announce that Ontario is designating much of its boreal forest. McGuinty will outline what is billed as his “vision” to protect one of the largest forest and wetland ecosystems on the planet.

McGuinty to unveil ‘vision’ to protect Ontario’s northern boreal forest:

Last year, 1,500 scientists from 50 countries called on Canadian governments - federal, provincial and territorial - to protect the 1.4 billion acres of boreal forest in Canada.

The scientists say the forest is the single-largest carbon storehouse in the world, with about 186 billion tonnes of carbon stored just in Canada’s boreal forest.

That’s the equivalent of 27 years worth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

The boreal forest is under increasing pressure from logging, mining and oil and gas companies.

Ontario premier supports award to Henry Morgentaler

Premier McGuinty speaks up:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday he supports the decision to award abortion crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler with the Order of Canada.

McGuinty, himself a Catholic, appears to be the first premier to address the issue publicly. His stance opposes that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has said he would have preferred to have seen the award bestowed on someone who unifies Canadians.

“I know that Dr. Morgentaler has been seen as a controversial figure, but I believe in a woman’s right to make a very difficult decision,” McGuinty said.

“And if she makes that difficult decision and chooses to have an abortion, I want her to be able to do that in a way that’s safe, in a way that’s publicly funded. So I know it’s divisive, but I think it’s important.”

The founding of Quebec, 1608

July 3rd, 1608 was the day when Samuel de Champlain landed at the site of Quebec city and founded the first permanent settlement of Europeans in Canada. Bells rang in cities all over Canada at 11:00 a.m., the traditional time of the landing.

Henry Morgentaler gets Order of Canada

On the good side, bishops are outraged.

The CBC says,

Governor General Michaëlle Jean has named a leading abortion rights crusader as a Member of the Order of Canada, news that has outraged anti-abortion groups….

Morgentaler, a trained family physician, argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies.

Morgentaler’s clinics were constantly raided by his opponents, and one in Toronto was firebombed. Morgentaler was arrested several times and spent months in jail as he fought his case at all court levels in Canada.

His victory came on Jan. 28, 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law. That law, which required a woman who wanted an abortion to appeal [have her doctor present her case: the woman never got to see them and there was no appealing their decision] to a three-doctor hospital abortion committee [available only if the hospital had one and if it ever met], was declared unconstitutional.

The old abortion committee system provided uneven and uncertain access to abortion for desperate women. Only about one-third of hospitals had working committees and some of those never approved an abortion.

And statistics are on our side:

In “BTC [Blog the controversy?]:Fine day for a debate“, Aaron Wherry writes

Angus Reid surveyed the Canadian public just a couple weeks ago. Here’s what they found.

Fully 46% of Canadians think abortion should be permitted in all cases. Another 19% think it should be permitted, but with unspecified restrictions, 22% would limit it to cases of rape, incest or in order to save a woman’s life, and seven percent would allow it only when a woman’s life is at stake.

If you put the question to Canadians in terms of legality, only five percent say abortion should be outlawed. Three percent aren’t sure. No less than 91% of Canadians think the law should allow abortion in at least some form.

Henry Morgentaler left regular medical practice because of the suffering he saw among unwillingly pregnant women. He made it known that he was doing abortions. He was acquitted by juries who agreed with his defence that he was preventing suffering among his patients. His acquittal was overturned by a judge and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Morgentaler, a concentration camp survivor then in his fifties, suffered a heart attack in prison and completed his sentence under medical care.

He is a fighter. He defied the law in order to change it. His clinic was illegal not because he was doing abortions but because he didn’t have a hospital committee to approve his decisions. The law that allowed a judge to overturn a jury conviction was struck down and Morgentaler became the only person in Canada to have a constitutional amendment named after him.

The law requiring hospitals that did abortions to have committees to which doctors presented the cases of their patients was struck down in January, 1988. Abortion is now a decision between a woman and her doctor. The law governing abortion is now the Canada Health Act.

His opponents apparently live in blueprints instead of houses, since they equate a fertilized egg with a baby, apparently on religious grounds about “souls,” since logic certainly doesn’t do it. When he was in the news more often, his file of death threats per month was inches thick. (Canadian doctors have been shot at, shot, and murdered.) His Toronto clinic on Harbord Street was fire-bombed in 1992. Way to capture the high moral ground, folks!

Unlike Dr. Morgentaler, people who are fighting against all abortions all the time are struggling to make Canada a worse place.

Illegal abortion has consequences. Whole hospital wards were closed when victims of septic abortion stopped filling them. Studies of those days put it as the major cause of hospitalization and death in pre-menopausal women. (My mother, in for appendicitis, shared a room with a woman who died while the nurses treated her with contempt and told her to stop complaining about the pain.) The saddest tales from those days are of the children orphaned because their mother couldn’t afford one more mouth to feed.

New York Times, “The abortion orphans”

CLARA BELL DUVALL WAS A 32- YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF FIVE WHEN SHE DIED OF AN ILLEGAL ABORTION IN 1929.

“The image of her in her casket is seared in my brain,” said Linn Duvall Harwell, who had just turned 6 when her mother died.

The hospital listed the cause of death as “pneumonia.”

She used a knitting needle.

She had a son and four daughters.

“She was a beautiful mother,” says Mrs. Harwell. “That must be understood. She was loving and affectionate. We were poor and it was 1929 but we were cared for. The minute she died, it all changed.”

“I can’t help but think how my life would have been different,” says Gwendolyn Elliott, who is a commander in the Pittsburgh Police Department. She was 5 when Vivian Campbell, her mother, died in 1950; she and her brother were raised by their grandparents. When she was 18 and ready for college, she tried to cash in some bonds her mother had left her and was told she needed a death certificate. And there it was, under cause of death: the word “abortion,” followed by a question mark.

The abortion orphans may be the shadow of things to come. Those of us who believe that abortion must remain legal are flailing about for a way to make vivid what will happen if it is banned once more. We have had the right so long that we have forgotten what the wrong is. Meant to evoke bloodstained tables and covert phone calls, the term “back alley” does not resonate for women who grew up with clean clinics and licensed doctors.

I have read interviews with people whose families fell apart, where brothers and sisters were split up and sent to orphanages or foster care after their mothers died of illegal abortion. Thank God for Dr. Morgentaler!

Links:

• Time line from the Globe & Mail (leaves out the firebombing of his clinic)
  
• Henry Morgentaler bio from CBC
  
• Reflection from a young woman
• Secularism is a women’s issue
• Nicaragua’s abortion ban kills 110 women in less than 2 years

Happy Dominion Day!

Or Canada Day, as it’s now called. But I like Dominion Day. Canada was the first Dominion in the British Commonwealth. It’s a free country separated from Britain by negotiation, not revolution.

The flag image is from Wade Penner’s site, Canflag.com. Wade is looking for work as a computer programmer.

Andy Schafly abuses the law

Submitted to a Candid World points out that Conservapaedia editor Andy Schafly is threatening to start a civil law suit knowing that it is completely without merit: Andy Schafly and dirty lawyering.

Conservapedia’s mortal enemy, RationalWiki, posted a side-by-side, point-by-point refutation of one of Conservapedia’s articles. The RationalWiki refutation article obviously included Conservapedia content, and employed it towards the end of comparison and criticism, which is clearly fair use within United States copyright law. When Andy saw RationalWiki’s article, though, and its appropriation and critique, he threatened to sue, asserting that his “copyright” on the Conservapedia material was infringed by its reproduction and critique. To say that Andy was wrong is to understate the point: it’s unclear whether Conservapedia, an open-source encyclopedia, even has a copyright, and even if it did, copying to critique is clearly fair use. Andy’s position was so wrong that he could not have even entertained the possibility that he was right. He threatened civil litigation knowing the law wasn’t on his side, hoping his legally unsophisticated opponent didn’t know enough to fight him. Threatening civil litigation in bad faith is bad enough; using a bad faith threat to exploit a legally unsophisticated party is even worse.

This is interesting, because I’ve known of lawyers who will send a letter on behalf of a landlord telling renters that the property has been sold and telling them to move out. In fact, the Landlord & Tenant act in Ontario explicitly states that sale of the property is not grounds for evicting a tenant: the property must be sold with a sitting tenant. But many renters don’t know that and feel forced to move out. Should I report them to the Law Society?

Federal conservatives designate lakes as dumps

The federal conservative government of Steven Harper is turning pristine lakes into toxic waste dumps for mines.

CBC News has learned that 16 Canadian lakes are slated to be officially but quietly “reclassified” as toxic dump sites for mines. The lakes include prime wilderness fishing lakes from B.C. to Newfoundland.

Environmentalists say the process amounts to a “hidden subsidy” to mining companies, allowing them to get around laws against the destruction of fish habitat.

Under the Fisheries Act, it’s illegal to put harmful substances into fish-bearing waters. But, under a little-known subsection known as Schedule Two of the mining effluent regulations, federal bureaucrats can redefine lakes as “tailings impoundment areas.”

That means mining companies don’t need to build containment ponds for toxic mine tailings.

…In northern B.C., Imperial Metals plans to enclose a remote watershed valley to hold tailings from a gold and copper mine. The valley lies in what the native Tahltan people call the “Sacred Headwaters” of three major salmon rivers. It also serves as spawning grounds for the rainbow trout of Kluela Lake, which is downstream from the dump site.

Identifying Ontario sport fish

I guess that leaves out native minnows. Everything else seems to be, er, game. See “Fish Identification & Urban Fishing Opportunities” (PDF). Unfortunately, this field guide does not include species names.

Go here to find links to other interesting publications, such as lists of lakes and their fish.

Aide’s bright idea saves Parliament from embarrassment

A few days ago, the Prime Minister of Canada apologized to the aboriginal peoples of Canada for the way we’ve treated them. The leaders of the aboriginal people wanted to respond, but that wasn’t allowed for in the Parliamentary procedure. Luckily, an aide for the New Democratic Party whispered, “Committee of the whole,” and it was so. Parliament re-constituted itself in a less formal configuration and enabled the “outsiders” to be heard.

—Joanna Smith
Ottawa Bureau

Four little words were all it took to end a logjam over whether aboriginal leaders would be allowed to respond to the government apology for residential schools from the floor of the House of Commons on Wednesday.

New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton had been pushing for this day for more than a year – it was even the first topic he raised when he met Prime Minister Stephen Harper in October 2007 to discuss the throne speech.

Just last week, he sent a letter to Harper suggesting what the apology should include. He was given a copy – whose content he shared with Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations – and called Harper to suggest some changes.

But opposition parties had slammed the government for refusing to give the aboriginal leaders a chance to respond, and the rhetoric continued right down to the wire.

Stepping outside to pose for a photo about an hour before the historic occasion was to begin, Layton told NDP press secretary Ian Capstick he feared the impasse would taint the moment with partisan pride.

“He expressed his great concern to me that an opposition party would move forward with an aggressive motion on the floor of the House of Commons, and that Conservatives would feel compelled to shut it down,” Capstick said yesterday.

Then came those four words.

“Committee of the whole,” Capstick said he told Layton, and the leader called Harper to save the day.

That phrase meant Parliament could take its ceremonial mace off the table, let the Speaker of the House sit in a regular chair and otherwise shed some of the formality that would have prevented the aboriginal leaders from responding.”It provides the House with a unique opportunity to have a more fulsome debate, without being constrained by party rotation, without being constrained so tightly by time limits and a whole host of different things,” he said.

Pathologist refused to have cancer tests re-examined

In New Brunswick, about 108 people with cancer have died over the past few years because they got the wrong results for cancer tests. Either they were told that they didn’t have cancer when they did or they were told that they had a kind that didn’t respond to treatment when it would have, and sent home without treatment.

Now it turns out that the doctor making the mistakes refused to let the tests be randomly checked. It’s a standard quality-control thing: some pathology reports done by each of the hospital’s pathologists would be reviewed by another hospital (and presumably vice-versa). The doctor, who was the head of the pathology department, declared that their workload was too heavy to allow for testing.

It sounds as if people were beginning to wonder about both his accuracy and his turnaround time (how fast he returned results) but they were blocked.

I can has minions

more cat pictures

Incidentally, there are apartment buildings in town that would suit Ming the Merciless or some other futuristic bad guy, and his minions of course:

Ming’s apartments, close-up:

Corporate headquarters of Ming the Merciless:

Fortress of Ming the Merciless:

The grandest of all Ming’s buildings is the National Art Gallery in Ottawa.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

It has been designated Ming’s Imperial Palace.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Baby beluga whale at Vancouver Aquarium

A young beluga whale gave birth to her first baby and was shown some parenting skills by her mother.

When you’re a first-time mom, it’s always a relief to know you have help from someone who’s been there.

This is no less important, apparently, when you’re a 12-year-old marine mammal.

Qila, a beluga whale who gave birth to a healthy female calf at the Vancouver Aquarium Tuesday, got some helpful pointers from her own mother, Aurora, without even having to ask.

“Grandma came to the rescue,” said the aquarium’s staff veterinarian, Martin Haulena. “She just went right for the calf and took her on her back and started riding her around … and just showed Qila what to do.”

Afterwards, Haulena said, Qila took over and the two have been bonding ever since. “She’s a natural mom.”

Rain slows forest fire in Manitoba

A forest fire in Manitoba has been slightly dampened by rain. The fire started Saturday afternoon during a rally of all-terrain vehicles in a provincial park. The ATV rally was called off four hours early after the fire started. The organizers have shut down access to their Web site and are not answering calls.

This news story suggest that several thousand hectares are burning. But I wonder if the reporter has mixed up hectares with acres.

MacLean’s Magazine says that 28 square kilometers have burned, but rain has reduced the fire to a smoulder

The fire, which has been burned about 28-square kilometres, was reduced to a smouldering blaze after 4.5 millimetres of rain fell overnight.

Tom Mirus, manager of the province’s conservation fire program, says the fire does not pose a direct threat to any community in the area and there have been no evacuations.

Two water bombers, two helicopters and ground crews are working to keep the fire contained, but Mirus says it could be days before it’s considered under control.

The fire was caused by humans and Mirus says investigators are trying to determine if an all-terrain vehicle derby being held in the forest may have sparked the blaze.

I don’t know what the hyphen in “28 square” means; probably nothing but it could mean that the fire is 28 km on a side.

Forest fire in Manitoba may have been sparked by ATVs

A fire in southern Manitoba is spreading after it started on ATV trails during a rally of all-terrain vehicles, which went ahead in spite of the extreme fire risk. The fire has spread to about 300 hectares (7500 acres).

Firefighters say that the muffler of an ATV against dry grass is hot enough to start a fire.

The rally was called off four hours early.

This is a wasteful, wasteful hobby.