Well said. May I add: undermines our moral superiority, such as it is, to justify our imposition on their local hospitality.

Or any traditional vice for that matter?

Im alll for innocent until proven guilty , but when such hanious allegations are made against a person THEY should not be paid a cent of money

You can't be all for it in one breath and against it in the next. This course of action has been followed for years and is the only way to honour our contract with those who are accused. You may not like it, but if we didn't follow it, we might just as well give up on the judicial process and jail anyone the police decide is guilty. How could that go wrong?

I don't disagree with anything you say. I tried to stay away from the related question of whether or not I think he is following the right process or has the right objectives in mind for his reforms. For me that's another interesting but separate question. The point of my remarks was in response to the comments above being so hard line on the question of having to change his mind on appointing unelected senators. The fact is that he's fought two or three elections on his current reform proposal. Nobody is biting at the provincial level to produce the slates he's looking for. At the federal level, his term limit legislation has not succeeded either - again, there's lots of room for discussing his strategies, personal accountabilities etc...

My only point is that he has followed the process he promised. It has stalled. In the meantime, he had 33 seats to fill and he chose to use the consitutionally proscribed method except where a province has followed his lead and provided him with "elected" choices. No matter how valid or invalid his attempts have been to provide reform - and lots of people will dispute that on both sides - he was way past time when he had to fill the seats. As far as I can tell, he is the only one accountable for his choices and you have opportunities to do so.

Past a certain point, I think people need to get over a politician having to do things differently than they said they would. SH has been clear: he wants Senate Reform. How he plans to achieve it have been pretty clear to the general public for quite some time now.

In the meantime, people seem divided on his exact plans and provinces have failed to embrace his request that they provide him with lists of candidates who have in some way received democratic blessings. Leaving 33 seats vacant is disrespectful to the constitution and unfair to the provinces who would have been unrepresented at all.

Regardless of party stripe or how one believes the place should be reformed, sooner or later those seats need to be filled. If you wish, judge him on how he fills them since that is the only direct accountability available for the moment, but give the guy a break and admit they need to be filled from a point of constitutional respect.

Was there evidence that street racing was directly tied to such a high number of fatalities? I'not being sarcastic or facetious: I just am interested.

Post-It Notes

Brilliant.

You also see many self-interested groups rushing to testify to their own benefit when policies that feather their respectives nests are threatened. Police associations will pile on the rhetoric about hwo they see the worst of the underbelly and that drugs are bad and they need to be punished hard to make everyone stop. No one questions them closely on empirical evidence; no one challenges their self interest to rely on drug stats to warrant overtime and extra perosonnel; no one asks them about the value they attach to using suspicion of possession of certain products as an excuse to search for other thigs.

"I don’t comment on their business and I don’t appreciate them commenting on ours,” Colin Campbell, the NHL’s director of operations, sniffed last week. “We take our business seriously.”

Many would argue that they don't take it seriously enough. As mentioned above, it took forever to mandate helmets and despite all evidence that visors should also be mandatory, there does not appear to be any imminent move in that tdirection. Complicating the fact is that the players' union will not step up in favour of the health of its memebrs because its members are divided.

In lots of other jobs, safety is forced onto workers because they will not accept the "bother" otherwise of safety harnesses, goggles, hearing protections, etc... And you still see lack of such equipment when work is being done on non-regulated sites by subcontractors.

I believe both the league and the union are both potentially culpable if a player ever gets up the nerve to file suit because of negligence on their part to accept reasonable safety precautions.