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Quirks and Quarks covered the Urination story back in 2013.

All experiments with this have so far been unqualified successes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

And before everyone goes "ERHMAHGHERD THE TAXPAYERS NEED TO SUPPORT A NATION OF HOMELESS JOBLESS BUMS!!!!", maybe consider the fact that you already are, except no-one's quality of life is actually improved.

At least he didn't take it on a plane.

Hello;

Homeopathy began in the 1720s upon the accidental discovery that milkmaids who get cowpox on their hands never get smallpox. The Homeopathic school assumed this met their criteria for "like protects against like" and from the homeopathic school we got immunization technology in 1720. Saucy wenches too. Woohoo.

Of The things that came from the school of homeopathy unacknowledged are digitalis, opium and more. Dr. Harris coulter MD writes:

"In the second half of the century pharmacology came increasingly under the influence of the allopathic pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, but such medicines remained in common allopathic use even so — often with the note that the "mechanism of action" remains unknown. These would include: belladonna, coffee and caffeine for headaches, ergot for headache (the OTC drug Cafergot), coffee for hyperactivity in juveniles, lobelia and stramonium for asthma (the OTC drug Asthmador), nitroglycerine for angina pectoris, opium and its derivatives for headaches, botulinum poison for strabismus and other visual disturbances, platinum (Cisplatin, platinol) for testicular cancer, cobra toxin in heart conditions and eye diseases, krait venom in myasthenia gravis, rattlesnake venom in epilepsy, honey-bee venom in arthritis, gold salts in rheumatism, quinidine in heart conditions, etc. etc."

These then are homeopathic medicines that quietly got snookerd into "mainstream medicine" that then attacked the school they came from. As the first post said it's political not scientific.

That crap about the magic water and sugar pills, that came out of a crazy guy in france in the 1960s and is nothing to do with it really. Ignore that.

Harris has a long essay which I found rather fascinating, the above is an excerpt and if you're interested in the history of medicine and pharmacology it's very definitely worth a read.

http://orthomolecular.org/libr...

Curiously too the "like works on like" idea is what saved us from ebola but in a post-Pauling world we know it was because a specific molecule disrupted the life cycle of the virus. Two different ways of saying the same thing it turns out. The molecule in question is in the African version o the virus but not the non-pathogenic Asian("Reston") strain. Actually there's 12 of them but never mind that.

So vaccines are homeopathic for one thing. And you want all homeopathic remedies banned? Ok, so digitals and ergot, you meant them right, and you want to ban vaccines? Why? Some of them actually work. Christ, not the flu shot though, that seems to have got stuck in reverse and now it adds to not subtracts from the death rate in seniors. Turns out the importance of those molecule Pauling was talking about turn out to be important, that' bat's beyond the scope of this quick note. The other Linus. he timelines got all messed up and there weren't supposed to e two of them now so that's a little odd too.

Flu vaccine paradox adds to public health debate
'Canadian problem' an example of odd effects of prior vaccination
CBC News Posted: Jan 16, 2015 2:46 PM ET Last Updated: Jan 18, 2015 5:35 PM ET
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/...

(other articles on CBC around the same time show Canada fond the vaccine doesn't live up to the numbers the Americans sent with it. 23% is not what was promised)

Translation: the more shots you get the more likely you are to die. Since they've never been shown to actually save lives the takeaway point from that is your chances of surviving the flu are great if you don't get a flu shot. Actually they improve if the levels of enzymes, minerals and fatty acids permit the body to overcome the oxidative stress caused by the virus but we'll go into that later. As one immunologist so aptly put it, just take your vitamin and you should be ok and it does turn out to be a dec

You're gonna tell kids the poles are melting?

What happens when they look at a map and see it's expanding?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

What happens if they go to James Bay which is solid ice now and hear it wasn't 30 years ago, check with NASA and find there's more ice now than before?

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

What happens if they look at the south pole?

http://www.nasa.gov/content/go...

When the disconnect between readily available physical evidence and the popular media is this vast you'd hope the educational system would side with science. Odds are these facts aren't in the curriculum (somebody should check).

As you ponder America augering into the ground consider the benefits of being truthful with children. The left bought black science guy and white science guy to brainwash children and Murdoch just bought NatGeo now he's figured it out, reasoning those ads^H^H^Hfacts last 30 years in dentists and doctors offices.

I thought America was all about truth and liberty? Not commercial propaganda and oppression of free thought.

This would be the best plan if officials have some way of designating temporary No-Fly zones like when the fire crews were grounded because of a drone during a recent wildfire here in Canada (with a built-in expiry requirement to prevent official abuse). They could even use it to restrict the minimum height that drones must fly over private property to prevent issues like the guy that shot down a drone because he thought it was peeping on his daughter.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

And even if they could help, they could not talk about it

https://news.vice.com/article/...

we're doomed

Meanwhile, scott walker is talking about building a wall on the border with Canada.

Your logical fallacy is strawman.

No one ever said anything about tracking you at home, or while away from the office. Meanwhile, study after study after study continually show that sitting all day, per the office drone norms, is terrible for you.

Wearing a little watch-sized gizmo that tells you to get up and stretch your legs every few hours is hardly the most Orwellian oversight I can imagine. And really, the company has entirely pragmatic reasons for the idea, beyond BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. Simply put: healthier employees are cost effective. You'll take less surprise sick days; even if your total days off work remain constant, you'll have more vacation time which is planned in advance. You'll also be in a generally better mood, less bitching about how much your back is killing you

Oh, and we already do have a shady organization tracking the air you breathe. It's called the fucking EPA.

Yeah that's why small businesses don't exist in the scandinavias, or canada

Really? Canada has over a million small businesses, which employ 48% of the workforce and contribute 42% of the private GDP.

Nice straw man.

Yeah, an article about something like this with no pictures? Come on.

CBC News article with pictures.

Nice link.

Yeah, an article about something like this with no pictures? Come on.

CBC News article with pictures.

I'd go for being stuffed in a tube and given a knockout drug over this design.

I do think being stuffed in a tube and given a knockout drug *should* be an option. 4 hour flights are unbareable.

This was pretty funny: "Earlier this week, North Gulf Air based out of Atlanta GA announced they will now be charging passengers for not only the weight of their bags but for their personal body weight as well. For a base fare of $29.00 passengers will be allowed to travel anywhere in the United States with a total of 90lbs, but after that it will cost customers $2.50 per additional pound. "

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thisis...

Note that "This is That" is a satire radio program - the podcast it pretty good.

Housing: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asitha... - check

Transportation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - check

The reason people want expensive cars and private planes beyond convenience is as an outward sign of Reputation within a community and culture that revolves around money. The article points to a shift away from that mentality.

You mean like this guy, found not guilty, who WOULD have chemicals, who DID, who stored them correctly, and was SWATTED over it:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I dunno if AC will check back or not - but in no particular order:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.reuters.com/
http://rt.com/
http://www.cbc.ca/
http://www.news.com.au/
http://www.dailytelegraph.com....
http://news.sky.com/
http://kurdishdailynews.org/
http://rt.com/
http://www.jpost.com/
http://www.aljazeera.com/
http://www.china.org.cn/
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://timesofindia.indiatimes...
http://english.pravda.ru/
http://www.projectcensored.org...
http://www.arabtimesonline.com...

I think I've covered the best - be aware, some national sites are heavy into propaganda. Pravda very much so, RT somewhat less so.

Depending on your own interests - you might type in some country in a Google search, and add "times" or "post" or "news". From time to time, I do something like that - the earthquake in Tibet for instance. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=pale... That search offered up a number of sites, but I didn't add any of them to my feeds. Note that many of the hits are very politicized, but you can still find Tibetan news sources among them.

Have fun!

oops... http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/...

There is plenty of evidence to support BOTH sides of this argument but there is documentation that indicates piracy doesn't harm the music industry as much as they say it does and in some cases may increase sales:

CBCNews
Case for Promoting Online Sharing

This is exactly the problem. I live in a place (Canada) where the carriers in the last year have switched from a "first checked bag is free" to a surcharge system for domestic flights. The airlines are raking in the money, but we've instantly gone from the relatively quick and uneventful boarding we had for years to the standard US-carrier-style slow chaos and delays as people cram the overhead bins and inevitably have to check luggage when they are full. As a long-time traveler under both systems, I'd be happy to have the cost of the first bag rolled into the price, because the current system sucks compared to the old one, but obviously the airlines prefer the cash to the chaos.

Tom Mulcair was on the CBC yesterday, and I have to say (as a non-committed voter who has voted NDP, Green, Liberal and --in a sad episode of my youth-- some Family somethingorother anti-abortion party) that I like the things he says and the way he says them. No hype, no theatrics, just intelligent arguments and thoughtful principals.

With Harper, we will get a precipitous slide into government by the rich, for the rich; with Trudeau, a gentler slope but the same trajectory. I truly believe that Mulcair will try to roll back some of the encroachments on individual rights and liberty, and actually start us headed towards environmental responsibility.

Is it possible that Mulcair will fall victim to the same hubris and vested interests as other politicians? Of course. But why not start out with at least a little hope for positive change?

I heard this article in the CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks... Here is a quote: "They found that in animal models, measles provokes a kind of "immune amnesia", in which the immune system forgets how to fight infections it's previously encountered. Further epidemiological work suggested that this amnesia can last more than two years, causing roughly 50% more deaths than would have happened otherwise." This would affect the validity of this test and makes me question if this is the only disease that has this affect.

No kidding. Not to mention any additional contact you have with the victim adds to your own risk of getting caught. People who pay out on ransomware are basically doubling down on their loss for the very very slim chance they will get anything back. Take this story, these idiots paid TWICE for the same ransom and still didn't their files back.

I do not know a single politician outside the US who would think that even remotely considering pushing an agenda as harebrained as creationism is anything but political suicide. ...well, except in Canada these days. A couple years ago, our minister of *science* was refusing to answer questions about whether he believed in evolution. More recently, Alberta also had a creationist minister of education.. So unfortunately, some of the madness has escaped North of the US.

When you ask "Then HOW", you'll already find the answer elsewhere in this discussion. Or you can just use Goggle or Bing or Dogpile. Bigamy and polygamy are still illegal in Canada - the criminal code is federal law, not provincial, so this ruling applies across the country. Maybe at some point another provincial criminal court will render a different decision, in which case the whole thing will end up before Canada's Supreme Court.

That being said culturally we are being morally bankrupted more by a culture of fear and secrecy than hackers. Gag orders only work to cause public distrust in the long run and so does a lack of transparency.

The vulnerabilities in these devices will not cause problems long term because their code is transparent the same thing cannot be said about closed source devices. Fortunately Microsoft is transparent and does appreciate users telling them about security flaws otherwise I would never use a Windows device again. Naturally the flaws that exist are harder to fix but at least they do try to make their products and OSes bullet proof from the NSA. Touch wood.

Also 1/3 of all English-speaking Canadians use US Netflix, so I am sure this is also helping.

I know it's helping for me personally, as the first thing I do when I want to watch something is check Netflix.

So American Airports/Airlines have to pay rent on the land? Pay for their security services (Homeland Security)? Put money aside for future improvements? Pay the full cost of traffic control?
Couple of articles comparing Canada vs the US, Google has lots more.
http://business.financialpost....
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

If your ideological position allows you to divide people into groups in the first place (men, women, straight, gay, white, black, rich, poor, etc.), then the people who find themselves attacked as a group in the contemporary space based on that ideology will suffer from discrimination and it shows in courts, in laws that are passed, etc. If a group of people is attacked there will be a counter movement created by that attack, why do you find that surprising or even wrong?

Yes, there are men who have genuinely suffered bad consequences of this ideology where they themselves are in no way proponents of any type of oppression towards any group.

As to the movie itself, well the media is the message, I can see how some people can take any media and message and put theirbown perspective on it. But calling for a boycott is not the same as calling for discrimination or violence.

Calling for a boycott is speech. By the way governments hate speech. Canadian government wants to prosecute a group of people calling for a boycott of Israel because Israeli forces are given orders to target civilians on purpose. Canadian government wants to use so called 'hate speech' laws to prosecute those people criminally.

So AFAIC whether there is something or not behind this call for a boycott, it does not make the claims behind the calls into bad faith claims.

Harper's government, helped by the Liberals, forcefully pushes bill C-51 to make such government spying legal.

Want to bet a lot of U.S.A. communications are going to go through Canada's carriers before reaching their destination? (even within the U.S.A.)

It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming.

Simply not true, unless you believe that non-terrible code requires God himself to reach down and personally touch type.

I heard a bit of CBC episode recently, where a breathing consultant by the name of James Chambers argues that humans are terrible at breathing, and that with proper training (this takes about a year), we're almost competent (and then flowers bloom everywhere in an orchestral swell).

Breathe In, Breathe Out

One thing I will say is that a programmer is only as good as the API he or she programs against. In the spirit of Bill Maher, I hereby announce a New Rule: Garbage under, garbage above.

Most of the programmers with legendary reputations for writing correct systems have worked at (or fairly close to) the bare metal (or some POSIX-ratified virtual bare metal with extra starch).

Humans actually suck at just about everything. Programming is not especially special (modulo rampant innumeracy). All the greats in any discipline recognize and work within their personal limitations.

It's not constructive to become so bitter that you give up, or delegate the hard work to a tool that can only take you so far (perhaps less far than you wish to go).

Just the other day I listened to this Econtalk episode from six months back: Joshua Angrist on Econometrics and Causation

For the entire episode, Russ Roberts is trying to play the same pessimism card, effectively implying that humans suck at everything.

Joshua Angrist is having none of it. He directly refutes the posture of excessive pessimism time and again. It's a joy to hear Russ taking one on the chin for a change.

Now we just need an enterprising academic to self-subscribe to a personal mission to save us all from ourselves to come along and wrap up the whole of econometrics into a protective cocoon inside of which many of the basic errors simply can not be made.

Brave new world? Or cult of pessimism?

In my corner of the world, hard-baked optimists don't write unthinking rants anchored on assertions prefaced with "statement of fact". Wits on dial tone predicts no good thing.

Friday's judgment puts an end to the various legal battles initiated by the former employees against Wal-Mart, but the company could decide to contest the amounts owed to its former workers.

The store shut down a few months after the workers became the first Wal-Mart employees in North America to be unionized in 2004. They were negotiating a collective agreement when the store suddenly shut on the same day an arbitrator was appointed to resolve an impasse in negotiations.

The workers, who belonged to the United Food and Commercial Workers union, said it was their union activities that led to the store closure. The union has said the closure was part of a worldwide strategy by the retail giant to stop other workers from unionizing elsewhere.

In the case before the Supreme Court, an arbitrator had agreed with the union, which had argued work conditions were illegally modified because Wal-Mart had not demonstrated, in its opinion, the decision to terminate employees was taken during "ordinary course of the company’s business." For example, if the store was losing money.

The Supreme Court overturned the appeal court decision which had disagreed with the arbitrator.

And here: Quebec unionized Wal-Mart workers win Supreme Court victory. There is no appeal from the supreme court. Walmart can "review" the decision all it wants, but now it's about deciding proper compensation.

I think this whole education solves all is a giant hail mary wish.

I'm in Canada and this is all we hear as the solution as well. Economy is going down, jobs leaving... invest in education.

Yet, where are the results? Nortel collapse. BB not doing too well. Skilled foreign workers programs. Can anyone tell me why we waste all this money on Western education if we're just going to import our skilled labor? If they can do the work, maybe all this spending on education is a waste. Seems they can spend much less and get good people.

You look at the US as well. Ok, some great companies in the US. No doubt about it. Here's a small hint to people. The US has over 300 000 000 people.

Heck, here's some perspective. Silicon Valley can't even provide prosperity for California. Just let that sink in. These guys talk about technology and education bringing prosperity to a whole country. Yet, it can't even bring prosperity to a single state.

Globally there's probably 6 or 7 billion people. Are we all going to be coders? Seriously...

Software and technology definitely gets people some jobs. But it pales in comparison to hundreds of millions and billions of people. But of course, rather than deal with this reality, our leaders just say... somehow if we pour enough into education, magic will come out and bring back the 1990s or whatever.

It's all they can think I guess.
I don't have all the answers, but we put way too much thought into education and far too little into everything else.

Germany is a huge powerhouse. They also have a big industrial policy. Ditto for China. And China has huge state firms and state lending.

I'm personally just sick of the education solves all problems that dominates North America. Where the hell are the results of all these?
Again, I'm not saying we don't need an educated populace. It's just does not solve the problem of jobs/prosperity.

I liken it to the great myth of solving healthcare costs. Only politicians and even people like to trot out that prevention will fix healthcare costs. It sounds nice, prevention is low cost and you won't need expensive surgery.

Of course, the data doesn't support that.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

Basically, most costs are in old age anyways. In the big picture, unhealthy people are actually cheaper to treat because they die sooner.

Instead of dealing with the reality of old age costs, and the nasty debate of that (rationing, death panels...), we all just throw a hail mary at prevention.

Education sounds similar. A giant hail mary to solve a problem it can't.

With all the aboriginal women who have been murdered, and the Robert Pickton serial killer case, people now see that it doesn't matter if the women were in the sex trade - they have as much right to a safe life as anyone else.

This attitude change came about after broadcasters were confronted with the discriminatory way they were handling non-aboriginal and aboriginal cases - aboriginal cases were much less likely to include interviews with friends and family, or even a picture. The same was true about women working in the sex trade. They were somehow less deserving of investigation into their deaths or disappearances.

Now the media goes out of its way to "re-humanize" the victims, and Canadians just aren't buying the "she had it coming because she was a prostitute" or "what do you expect from aboriginals" prejudicial mentality any more. We expect more from ourselves, the police, and the government in terms of equal protection for all.

Part of the problem is that, rather than working towards harm reduction, the Harper government has done its best to ignore calls from the police, opposition, groups such as amnesty international, the victims families, and ordinary citizens to hold an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women. "That's not going to happen." And it's strictly politics, since his conservative base likes the "tougher on crime" stance better than the "lets try to fix the underlying problems and in the meantime give equal protection to all" harm reduction model.

While I can't speak to the newer generations of models, but climate models from the 1990's have already been tested in the way that you describe:
"UN climate change projections made in 1990 'coming true' ... The world is warming at a rate that is consistent with forecasts made by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 22 years ago."
http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yo...
The news article is based on: http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

We already know that some of the climate models in the 1990's have made two decades worth of accurate predictions.

Not sure what you're smoking. Canada has quite a healthy private health care industry:
http://www.cbc.ca/news2/backgr...

Not only is it outrageous and unconstitutional, it's totally valueless. The Feds can't even stand in the way of people for whom they have good information that they might be interested in doing harm, let alone find anything new. The real purpose of a program that is so ineffective, can only be to retroactively find dirt on political outcasts and then put them in prison.

Citations:

• Feds warned about Boston bombers: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...
• The Feds monitored one of the Texas shooters, and he spent time in jail: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/p...
• Uselessness of the mass surveillance program:
  http://www.tomsguide.com/us/rs...
  http://articles.chicagotribune...

That could be part of it. Anyone following the project knows that these protests have been going on for a while at low levels, but didn't really kick up until last month at about exactly the same time as when Canada chipped in $240 million.

There is another part though; the Hawaiian sovereignty issue. Of course, that's a bullshit line of reasoning in a lot of ways (as I discuss here). Is this a shakedown for money by activist leaders or way of inciting anger for their own political gains? Probably both, though the latter seems to be more of a clear goal. Then again, if its the former, that's not something one would openly admit.

This has been going on for a long time - although it was not called "torture", but "research".

Here in Canada, the CIA funded Dr. Ewan Cameron's "psychic driving" experiments under the MKULTRA program.

Dr. Cameron was also the head of both the American and World Psychiatric associations.

"Patients" were given treatments such as electroshock, LSD, drug-induced comas, etc., although many of the patients were there for anxiety or depression and did not consent to these types of treatments. Cameron essentially turned his patients into vegetables who suffered from amnesia and forgot how to talk or dress themselves. Some did not remember family members and forgot how to use the bathroom by themselves.

Many of the surviving victims were eventually given small financial settlements, and the Canadian government and CIA were essentially absolved of any wrong doing as a result.

The Fifth Estate productions produced an excellent movie based on Dr. Cameron and his experiments, entitled The Sleep Room".

You can watch it online here.

I heard about it on the CBC Radio program called Spark a few years ago. Here's a link to a story from 2011. I don't know if it's still the same today or not.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...

As for the great lakes, they froze early, thawed late and had 100 year record levels of ice; some froze completely which is nearly unprecedented and niagara falls froze twice in 2 years.

All signs of a warming world no doubt.

But please drag out the weasel words and explain this. Extra points or quoting "Skeptical science".

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
https://www.facebook.com/video...
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/20...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

Its Thursday the 2nd. I have not had my coffee yet. Not funny.
I thought this junk was supposed to stop at noon local time. Was it posted from some Pacific Island near the Date Line?

Lets just bring back OMG Ponies every year and be done with it.

Not sure if you can view this from outside of Canada, but CBC's Marketplace show did an expose on this with some repair guys who were in the industry for over 3 decades.

Faulty Appliances: Repairmen Unplugged

In short, yes, they do build 'em like shit now.

There's some big news coming out of Canada this morning: Future Shop stores are permanently closing or becoming Best Buy stores.

I would consider submitting this as a story, but it involves technology and not social justice, so I know it likely wouldn't get to the front page here.

So let us discuss this matter here instead. These closures will drastically alter the technology retail scene in Canada. But it additionally highlights the quickening decline of the Canadian middle class. Once one of the most equitable societies in the world, Canada is quickly becoming a very stratified society, where you're either living in poverty or extremely wealthy. This is all thanks to near-unlimited immigration, combined with harmful "free trade" deals like NAFTA.

Because those grieving believe that the tragedy could have been avoided if the authorities had more power. They would trade much for the assurances that this could not happen again. The sister of the single casualty in Ottawa's attack last year is making this argument for bill C-51.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Canadian government mails out leaflets "you support us, or the terrorists".

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Toet's mailout asks "What do you think?" and requests people check off one of the following options:

      * I agree with my MP Lawrence Toet. We must take additional action to protect Canada from terrorism.â
      * I disagree. Terrorists are victims too.

~97% of electricity produced in Quebec comes from hydro. A lot of that is exported too (~$1 billion per year). HydroQuebec is also investing significantly in alternative energy sources because their hydro capacity is expected to peak in the next decade. Alternatives include biomass, wind, thermal, etc. It's a good thing. They do have a gas plant which is currently not used due to the huge surplus.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... (2011)

Thus as we hear about judge after judge giving their blessings to insanely unconstitutional behaviour, and we hear about watchdogs that aren't watching keep in mind about who vetted these people in the first place.

I'm not going to claim that there is no problem (and the biggest problem the country faces is inside the PMO), but the courts have been pretty damned good at blocking the Harper Regime's unconstitutional laws.

Everything from

Federal Court rightly strikes down Harper’s refugee health-care cuts

Supreme Court prostitution ruling forces issue on Harper

Supreme Court strikes down assisted suicide ban

Supreme Court softens Tories' tough-on-crime sentencing law

As for over-seers, we do need more and better ones, but let's not forget Sheila Fraser

and

Kevin Page who was actually appointed by Harper (and I imagine Harper regretted it):

His approach of questioning government estimates and issuing reports that are at odds with official government forecasts has created controversy. "There are former parliamentarians saying I should be held in contempt of Parliament and should be fired, but I’m okay with them saying that. That’s just part of the debate."[9] He has been unapologetic about his desire to give the Parliamentary Budget Office a significant role in informing Parliament and Canadians about government finances, saying "I went to the OECD, and they said the Americans have the best budget office, bar none. Why can't we be the best in five years? If that's overstepping my mandate, then I'm earning my money."[10]

Thus as we hear about judge after judge giving their blessings to insanely unconstitutional behaviour, and we hear about watchdogs that aren't watching keep in mind about who vetted these people in the first place.

I'm not going to claim that there is no problem (and the biggest problem the country faces is inside the PMO), but the courts have been pretty damned good at blocking the Harper Regime's unconstitutional laws.

Everything from

Federal Court rightly strikes down Harper’s refugee health-care cuts

Supreme Court prostitution ruling forces issue on Harper

Supreme Court strikes down assisted suicide ban

Supreme Court softens Tories' tough-on-crime sentencing law

As for over-seers, we do need more and better ones, but let's not forget Sheila Fraser

and

Kevin Page who was actually appointed by Harper (and I imagine Harper regretted it):

His approach of questioning government estimates and issuing reports that are at odds with official government forecasts has created controversy. "There are former parliamentarians saying I should be held in contempt of Parliament and should be fired, but I’m okay with them saying that. That’s just part of the debate."[9] He has been unapologetic about his desire to give the Parliamentary Budget Office a significant role in informing Parliament and Canadians about government finances, saying "I went to the OECD, and they said the Americans have the best budget office, bar none. Why can't we be the best in five years? If that's overstepping my mandate, then I'm earning my money."[10]

Canadian border agents have vaguely broad powers to search travellers; whether that includes demanding passwords is not explicitly stated and is untested in the courts. That's likely to change, however, as they recently charged someone for refusing to give up his phone's password:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

How is homeopathy any different from traditional medicine in that regard? Yet people still use it, and on their kids. I immediately thought if this recent news story up here in Canada... sad.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/aborigi...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2...