Weekend Update

There are several things I have the urge to blog about, so here goes:

One of my favourite issues, accomodations for religious practices in the public sphere reached new heights after Elections Canada agreed to allow veiled Muslim women to vote without showing their faces. The Cons, Libs, and the Traitors (i.e. the Bloc) have all denounced the move, but the Dippers are ok with it. The article also mentions that there's a simple mechanism to deal with this: women remove their veil in front of a female voting official to identify themselves. I still have a problem with that, since it is sexist. Wouldn't it be hilarious if men started showing up at voting booths wearing this and only agreed to show their faces to other men? How far do these accommodations go?

You know what's really worrying though? Elections Canada doesn't actually require you to present photo ID when you vote. I worked at a polling station during the 2006 elections, and it surprised me quite a bit. Most voters assume that you must present photo ID and bring it, but you can just vote by showing a couple of documents with your name and address on them. Think about it, voting in an election is the basic and fundamental component of a democracy, but I could pretend to be you and you could pretend to be me and no one would be the wiser. I know that not everyone drives, so the solution I support is for every citizen to have an improved citizenship card that uses the same format/technology as the Permanent Resident (PR) cards we have now. The current citizenship cards aren't really that...advanced. They're dinky little pieces of laminated plastic that remind me of my high school student card.

This also reminds me of the great worry that most Canadians now face with the impending requirement for passports to cross the US border by land and sea. I don't get why people don't understand this simple concept: it's another country. My fellow Canadians will spend a lot of time and energy bashing the US and making sure people know that we're not Americans, but when it comes to entering the country somehow we're outraged that we'll have to present the same document that we have to present to enter every other country in the world.

The Ontario Election campaign was quite boring until John Tory went all Stockwell Day on us when he "said religious schools should be allowed to teach creationism if they receive public funding." Nice. I actually liked him as a candidate until he announced his support to fund all faith based schools. Now with this I suspect he's lost a lot people who were on the fence about voting Tory.

Speaking of funding all faith based schools, it either makes sense to fund all of them or none of them. In this sense, Tory's position is actually coherent and principled, whereas McG's (that's a tdotgrit copyrighted nickname there) position (funding for Catholic schools but not for any based on other faiths) is neither. Andrew Coyne sums it up much more eloquently than I ever could, so just read his piece. I myself am against any public funding for faith based education. If Tory's idea is adopted, we'll obviously have funding for Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish schools immediately. Just don't complain when my friends and I receive funding for the Pastafarian Collegiate Institute. Just think about it, school uniforms will be pirate costumes, everyone will be required to say "arr" at the end of every sentence, and of course the beer volcano will be a centre-piece in the school cafeteria.

And for something completely non-political, I'm salivating over the new iPods. I was decided on eventually getting an iPhone, but now I'm thinking I'll get the iPod touch and this kickass phone which no one seems to know about. I have high hopes for Openmoko.