The Editorial Times.ca also exists as a regular "old style" web page. As webstyles and technology advances, I decided to add a more formal blog format to facilitate comment with less manual effort. As most have discovered, using the web for contemporary awareness is a thief of time. In true Windows tradition, once gone, never regained.

My interests tend to congregate around the Canadian political and social scene. I am somewhat right of centre, with tangentially spasmodic lefty episodes from time to time, and anchored in the belief that the words Rights and Privileges can't co-exist in the same democratic lexicon.

I had a longish conversation with a colleague the other day about driving. He maintained adamantly it was a privilege (he has a biased viewpoint somewhat, having been the victim of a terrible car accident that took years to recover from). Equally adamantly, I insisted that, on public roads, paid for by public funds, that it was unequivocally a right, freely granting that constraints on the right would be appropriate for matters of safety, but only for matters of safety. Living in Canada for those born of the land (and by extension, to those granted citizenship, with qualification) is not a privilege. The Government isn't given a mandate to assign or denigrate my rights on behalf of someone else, regardless of who they are, or where they came from.

Canada's government isn't entitled to assign privileges to disparate groups who don't have a specific mandate to serve the public interest in a narrow bureaucracy; its role is to protect rights, uniformly, absolutely.
The time of "special deals" for "special people" must come to an end if Canada is to survive. I'm not talking about wheelchair ramps for disabled folk, but rather aiming at the practice of awarding cultural privileges to narrow groups, to the exclusion of others. Arguably, I would maintain that "multi-culturalism" as it is practiced in Canada is inherently discriminatory, and not sustainable.

What do you think? Canada becoming another word for "Yugoslavia"?