The self-absorbed shithead who thinks himself head of state....

Stood on the saluting stand on Canada Day and violated the honour of every member of the Canadian Forces past and present.

The prime minister of Canada is not the head of state. That position belongs to the Queen of Canada.

The prime minister of Canada is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. That duty rests with the Governor General of Canada.

The prime minister of Canada, as head of government, is entitled to a 19-gun salute, to a maximum of once per year, when at an established saluting station, as an honour gained at having been appointed by the Governor General. Canadian Forces Administrative Order 61-8 leaves no part of that in question. (It apparently has not been re-issued as a DAOD).

The prime minister of Canada is not entitled to a Canadian Guard of Honour. Ever. Heritage minister James Moore is wrong. But then, that's hardly surprising. The Conservatives simply took a matter of national military ceremonial intended for visiting foreign dignitaries and twisted the meaning to include their fat-assed, lense-loving, megalomaniac. Josef Stalin would be proud.

Harper stood there, in all his magnificent corpulence, having never crossed the threshold of a CF recruiting office door, because he missed that part of his life, with nary a decoration to his name and took a salute from the Governor General's Foot Guards... in a blatant and intentional breach of protocol.

If Harper wants a salute, he should visit me. I'll give him exactly what any mealy-mouthed politician is entitled to. I'll even tell him what to wear:

Groin protection.

The Emperor Steve

Montreal Simon catches Steve playing Napoleon on Canada Day :

"Harper managed to get the military to give him a salute that's normally reserved for the Governor-General. As Heritage Minister James Moore explains in the video, this was something that the Prime Minister apparently wanted."

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Really? How very presidential of him.

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The Governor General is the Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Forces – not the Prime Minister - but I guess since she allowed him to suspend parliament and declare himself head-of-state back in December, she may as well let him play with her honour guard as well..

Cross-posted at Creekside

In my mind I still need a place to go, all my changes were there

I've been living in Japan for a dozen years and I've only been home to Ontario a handful of times, so obviously I don't miss my home and native land that much right?

Wrong. Tonight I have a lump of homesickness that is sitting in my gut like a double order of congealed poutine.

Homesickness comes and goes, especially at the holidays, but Canada Day is always a tough one.

You see, one of my earliest jobs in the newspaper biz was at a little local weekly on the shores of Lake Erie - the Port Dover Maple Leaf - a nice little family owned and operated paper, which last I heard was being operated by the third generation of the Morris family. I was the only reporter for the paper - I actually lived over the Main Street office two blocks from the beach - and pretty much ate, slept and especially drank Port Dover 24/7/365.

(A brief digression: There is one good thing about being the only reporter for the only newspaper in town and that is that everyone in town knows you. There is one bad thing about being the only reporter for the only newspaper in town and that is that everyone in town knows you. The hour are very long and no matter how generous your boss is, he can't afford to pay you much wages. I didn't do these kinds of jobs for eight years across Southern Ontario because I was getting rich. 'Nuff said)

Port Dover, Ontario, perched (no pun intended) on the edge of Lake Erie, about an hour up the highway from Hamilton, is a summer town. It was, back in 1990 when I was there, the largest freshwater fishing port in the world. (See Stan Rogers "Tiny Fishes for Japan") and the fish they caught was the perch. The perch is not exactly a great sport fish. They don't get very big or put up much of a fight or require a tremendous amount of skill to catch with a rod and reel once you find them -- but cleaned, battered and deep fried when fresh out of the lake they are about the tastiest thing that swims as far as I'm concerned and I ate my share of them in Port Dover.

Aside from the fish, the town is a tourist trap. Back in the 20s and 30s it had been a big deal and all the steel barons from Hamilton and the rich folks from Toronto used to have summer homes there. Al Capone owned a mansion there during prohibition with a secret tunnel that led down to the lake for running rum across to the U.S. side. There were regular ferries from Erie Pa. and a big pier with a dance hall that was still a going concern when my parents were teenagers in nearby Brantford in the 5os an even into the 60s. There's a decent beach, a little hotel, a couple of bars and restaurants, a bunch of cheesy souvenir shops. Back when I was living in town, there was a great summer theatre too, and cherry blossoms in the spring, but the big attractions were the Friday the 13th Biker summits and CANADA DAY.

Friday the 13th promised excitement and noise and drunken partying and a sense of danger. I could sit in my front window and watch the fights in the parking lot of the Commercial Tavern across the street and see the bikes roar up and down the main street.

Canada Day promised local musical favorite Doug Feaver at the Norfolk Tavern, the Lions Club fish fry and beer garden and a huge parade right outside my front window. I entertained a lot in those days, with friends coming down summer weekends to drink beer, eat perch and hang out at the beach but Canada Day was the best. I'd have to shoot photos all day and night for the newspaper, but on a day like that people are glad to see the man with the camera and the notebook and just want to make sure their names are spelled right in the caption. Between the floats sponsored by local businesses, service clubs, church groups and politicians and the marching bands and the clowns and the school kids and the 4H kids and so on half the town marched in the parade and the other half - and thousands of tourists- lined the streets to watch them. Short of an isolated island in Algonquin Park with a bottle of Canadian Club and a few guitar-playing, canoe-paddling kindred spirits, it is by far the best place to spend Canada Day that I know.

Do I miss it? Would I swap working at the world's largest newspaper amid the bright lights of one of the world's greatest cities for covering planning council meetings in a hick, one-horse, backwater, struggling resort town in the middle of the South Ontario countryside?

This is not a good day to ask me that.

Let me ask you something - I've been gone from Canada longer thanAbousfian Abdelrazik - so long that Canada's New Government has changed the law to say that I can't vote in Canadian elections without moving back to the Great White North. I don't own any property in Canada. I don't even have a Canadian bank account. Am I still Canadian?

Let me tell you something:

I still remind American co-workers why the White House is white. I am the go to guy in my Tokyo office if you have a question about French (though I barely scraped through high school French). I know my way around a canoe. I have a visceral loathing of American beer. My Japan-born-and-raised kids say "eh" when speaking English and blueberry pancakes with maple syrup is their favorite breakfast. I get cravings for peameal bacon and still call french fries "chips". I got drunk and argued politics one night at the Norfolk Tavern in Port Dover with Stompin' Tom Connors - my shoulder and left arm were even in the TV commercial for his "A Proud Canadian" album that they shot in Port Dover. I grew up playing hockey in Sault Ste. Marie when native sons Phil and Tony Esposito were huge stars and Wayne Gretzky spent a year at my high school while playing Jr. A for the Sault Greyhounds just before he turned pro and while the holy Montreal Canadiens were winning the Stanley Cup every year. I remember the windstorm that blew our neighbour's chimney down the night the the Edmund Fitzgerald sank a couple dozen miles away on Lake Superior. I've polka'd to Walter Ostenak live at Oktoberfest in Kitchener. I spent my 17th summer planting trees and clearing canoe portages northwest of Kenora for $10 a day. I cook tortiere at New Years from my aunt's recipie. I've seen bears at the dump. I spent a couple of St. Patrick's Days getting hammered and singing Stan Rogers songs with cadets from RMC at the Wellington in Kingston. I was once the editor of the oldest community newspaper in Canada. I've eaten moose and seen them up close in the wild. I've seen the Habs at the Forum and eaten smoked meat at Schwartz's, Ben's and Dunn's. I've slept under a beached canoe after watching the Northern Lights on a late summer evening in the middle of the bush in Northern Ontario 100 miles from anywhere. I've made maple syrup. I've eaten lobster bought right off the dock in Peggy's Cove. I've played hockey with my grandfather on a frozen pond. I've chased raccoons and skunks out of my garbage. I've eaten fresh smoke salmon in B.C. and salted dried cod in the fortress of Louisbourg. I am one (very small) part Mohawk. I've had my pipes freeze. I've called in sick to work because I've been snowed in. I've had beers with old soldiers at the Legion on Rememberance Day. I've heated my home with a woodstove. I've seen Neil Young at the Ex and Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn at Hamilton Place and the Cowboy Junkies and Murray McLaughlin at the Festival of Friends and once met the Tragically Hip in a boozecan in Kingston. I've been rained on in Vancouver. I've jumped off the roof of my house into snow deeper than I was tall. I've been told to evacuate a provincial park in BC because there was a forest fire coming over the hill a mile away and closing, hell, I once fought a forest fire. I was in Montreal for the big "please don't separate" march before the last Quebec referendum. I was once a member of the Montreal Expos Battery Bleachers Fan Club when they still played at Jerry Park. I had a subscription to the original Captain Canuk comic book. I've been ice fishing. I own both and audio and a video cassette of the last Morningside with Peter Gzowski. Pierre Elliot Fucking Trudeau once asked me if I wanted to be Prime Minister when I grew up. I have tears flowing into my glass of Crown Royal and Canada Dry as I write this, but goddamn it Canada - There is a town in North Ontario with dream comfort memory to spare and Icould drink a case of you and how I wish I was in Sherbrooke now.

Oh, Canada....

(a special tip of the touque to Rina for telling me I must move back immediately last night and to all the other expats who are pining for home this week)

If it's not a part of their agenda, why are they doing it?

Because the only solid base of support they have comes from their Reform/Alliance roots.

Scott, JJ, Eugene and Dan have all commented and here, I pointed out that, regardless of what Harper and Day tell us, they do have an agenda they have not divulged. Beyond what has already occurred, this is evidence of government policy which has not been given a public airing and which was not advertised anywhere in the Conservative Party from the last election to the present.

The Conservative government will not co-sponsor a United Nations resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty, breaking with a nearly decade-old tradition.

An official with the Foreign Affairs Department says Canada will vote in favour of the resolution when it comes to the floor of the UN General Assembly in December, but will not sponsor it.

"There are a sufficient number of co-sponsors already, and we will focus our efforts on co-sponsoring other resolutions within the UN system which are more in need of our support," said Catherine Gagnaire.

Seventy-four other countries have put their names forward as sponsors, including the United Kingdom, Australia and France.

Last week, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day surprised the House of Commons by announcing that Canada will not oppose the execution of a Canadian citizen on death row in Montana for two murders. Day said the new policy will apply to "murderers" such as Ronald Allen Smith who have had a fair trial in a democratic country.

And what does it take to sponsor a resolution?

Canada's former ambassador to the United Nations, Paul Heinbecker, said co-sponsorship doesn't involve much effort - a simple phone call or the raising of a hand during a meeting.

He said in the absence of a radical change in the wording of such a mainstream resolution, the decision not to co-sponsor signifies a departure for the Canadian government.

"You can only take these as signs of how the government wants to be seen," Heinbecker said.

Putting us in lock-step with, guess who.

The United States and Japan are among the few democracies that have traditionally voted against anti-death penalty resolutions at the UN.

Making the Harper government even more visible as Bush water-carriers.

This is the world stage and it has everything to do with the image Harper wants to portray to his minority constituent base.

As others have already pointed out, the Harper Conservatives conducted a poll, which they kept as quiet as they could, only to discover that those in favour of capital punishment constituted a distinct minority of the population.

It's that minority to whom Harper is now playing.

This is the tough-guy image movement conservatives believe in. It doesn't matter that Canada was viewed globally as an honest broker with strong moral values. Now we are to be viewed, not as a country which punched above its weight diplomatically, but one which punches. Period.

The fact that the Conservatives executed a deliberate change in direction at the UN makes it a matter of national policy.

In short, this has been on the Conservative agenda all along, hidden from view to prevent a national debate the Conservatives could not win.

But, as we draw nearer to the inevitable federal election Harper and Day must get a recognizable signal out to the most narrow-minded of their supporters. It's a sample. A mere whisper intended to inject calm into the ranks of the radicals.

Give me a majority and I will give you everything you want.

Happy Birthday Canada

One hundred and forty years ago today the British North America Act of 1867 came into effect, superseding the Act of Union of 1840. With the colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada (Ontario and Quebec), the Dominion of Canada was formed.

The term "Confederation" was and is used, although Canada then and today is not actually a confederation. It is a federal state.

It remained a British dominion and lacked legislative independence. That would not come until December 11th, 1931 with the Statute of Westminster. With that Act, Canada's position in the British Empire changed. It was, for all intents and purposes an independent country and could, if the parliament of Canada approved, withdraw from any arrangement with the Crown and the British Commonwealth, however, there was still a legislative hook which remained with Britain.

At the time in 1931 when several British Empire parliaments were debating the merits of assuming more powers of independence, Canada was having difficulty determining a constitutional amending formula among the provinces. Despite the independence provided by the Statute of Westminster, the guarantor of the division of powers between provinces and the federal state remained in Britain. Constitutional amendments remained in the hands of Westminster; not Ottawa.

That changed in 1982 when the British North America Act was patriated to Canada and renamed the Constitution Act of 1867. At that time, Canada's status as a fully independent nation was formalized.

It's a slow process, apparently. And if anyone thinks it was peaceful I would recommend getting back to the history books.

Happy Birthday, Canada!