Patrick Brown and his under the bus philosophy

It's people like Patrick Brown who give politicians a bad name:

“Frankly, I’m very comfortable with the fact there’s been a falling out. I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that  and Campaign Life are upset,” the PC leader said, adding he now regrets voting against same-sex marriage and abortion when he was a Conservative MP. 

“If Charles McVety wants his ten bucks back for membership, he can have it. If he wants to vote for someone else, he can vote for someone else, so be it,” he said. 

“Frankly, I think they take more credit for any part of my leadership campaign than is merited. I went out and signed up 45,000 members.”

Back in December 2014, I sent an email to a couple of politicians expressing my concern over the Liberals sex-ed curriculum. Almost immediately after I sent the email, Patrick Brown emailed me back from his personal email address (like he did to CLC) asking me for my phone number. I gave it to him and he called me back. He told me in no uncertain terms that he was against the sex-ed curriculum. I asked him at the time if he was also concerned about the Liberals decision to hide abortion information. He told me he was for open access to information, although any further emails I sent him on this subject, remained unanswered (that should have been my first clue to PB's philosophy).

I subsequently bought a membership for myself and my husband and we voted for him for the leadership, which he won. I know many many others who did the same.

It's pretty easy to tell people what they want to hear if you if you don't need to worry about keeping your promises. Because once you've won, well there isn't much they can do about it is there?

Did Patrick Brown sign up 45,000 members? Or did we do it for him?

And Patrick? Johnathon Van Maren has some good advice for you:

"Social conservatives, as I’ve written before, are not numerous enough to single-handedly put someone in office. However, we are numerous enough to ruin the career of someone like Patrick Brown, who has managed to lie to us, betray us, call us intolerant bigots, and then shruggingly suggest we vote for someone else in the confidence that we won’t. If we keep letting politicians like Patrick Brown treat us like that, we are simply ensuring that no politician will ever take us seriously, because they can have their cake and eat it too—they can get so-con votes while telling the Toronto downtown elites that they think we’re kind of repulsive. I think it’s time for social conservatives to show that we care more about putting someone Conservative in power. We have real concerns that need to be addressed, and if Patrick Brown is an impediment to that, then we should treat him as such."

Good luck Patrick in trying to get anyone to believe you ever again. I think you're going to need it.

Let's rip up the Canadian Charter while we're at it

This is perverted:

"Authorities should bar doctors from refusing services like abortion and assisted death on moral grounds, and screen out potential medical students who might impose their values on patients, leading Canadian and British bioethicists argue in a provocative new commentary. 

The paper by professors at Queen’s and Oxford universities, who are also editors of two major bioethics journals, throws rocket fuel onto a debate already inflamed by the new law allowing assisted death. 

They argue that physicians have no right to opt out of lawful medical services — from abortion to prescribing contraceptives — that are requested by a patient and in the person’s interest. 

Those who let conscientious objection affect patient care are clearly unprofessional, say Udo Schuklenk and Julian Savulescu. 

“Doctors must put patients’ interests ahead of their own integrity,” they write in the journal Bioethics. 

“If this leads to feelings of guilty remorse or them dropping out of the profession, so be it,” says the bluntly worded piece. 

“There is an oversupply of people wishing to be doctors. The place to debate issues of contraception, abortion and euthanasia is at the societal level, not the bedside... 

...Schuklenk said it is debatable whether currently practising doctors should be barred from practising because they morally object to facilitating certain legal services. 

But it would be reasonable to screen applicants to medical school and eliminate those unable to put aside their moral values, he said, comparing the idea to a medical faculty in South Africa rejecting racist students. 

Such screening might exclude people of certain religious beliefs from becoming doctors, but there is little evidence that would be detrimental to patients, the commentary says."

Is this what we call progress? Just because something is legal doesn't make it moral. This sounds like what Hitler demanded of his doctors in Nazi Germany. It may have been legal then to perform horrid medical experiments, etc. on people, but it certainly wasn't moral.

In fact even now we wonder why presumably decent men and women performed those experiments and didn't refuse based on their (presumablely) moral objections. And now we want doctors to behave like they did in Nazi Germany.

And notice that last sentence. With Schuklenk and Savulescu, it's apparently also okay to exclude people because of their religious beliefs.

Forget morality. Forget freedom of conscience. Forget freedom of religion. Done with that. That's so old school.

Dear Kathleen Wynne - Freedom of Information Quote 11

Dear Kathleen Wynne - Freedom of Information Quote 10

"In my view, to deny access to generalized, non-identifying statistics regarding an important public policy issue such as the provision of abortion services would have the effect of hindering citizens’ ability to participate meaningfully in the democratic process and undermine the government’s accountability to the public." Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, 2000

Dear Kathleen Wynne - Freedom of Information Quote 9

“Information sharing should not be impeded because of excessive classification rules …. we must work to extinguish the belief that those who collect information own it.” -- William P. Crowell, Markle Task Force on National Security in The Information Age, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, 8 Nov. 2005