Conservative MPs and ideologues alike have adopted 2006 Conservative candidate’s Rondo Thomas’s most famous utterance as their mantra: “the facts don’t matter.”  North Shore News columnist Trevor Carolan is such an ideologue.  He is trying to wrestle the title of village idiot away from fellow North Shore News columnist Trevor Lautens.  The North Shore News meanwhile seems eager to recapture the title of Vancouver’s most backward newspaper, a title it automatically won every year Doug Collins was on Staff. 

Here are his most recent idiocies:

“Fellow citizens never mind the avian flu.  Consider instead the contagion of unelected officials their weight around with the health of our civil society.  
In Ottawa, Bernard Shapiro, the unelected Liberal-appointed parliamentary ethics commissioner, is hassling Prime Minster Harper about David Emerson.” 

  
That said, in light of Shapiro’s most recent report, do not expect the Conservatives to introduce a new ethics commissioner any time soon.  They already have their man, only Carolan did not know it at the time is probably wishing he could go back in time and rewrite his column. It is hard to pronounce Shapiro’s report objective having just characterized him as a hack.  After all, hacks are by definition guided by something other than the facts and as in common law, precedent matters.    & nbsp;

    & nbsp;  
“But Shapiro’s ethics appear selective: Where was he when Belinda Stronach was instantly rewarded with a cabinet post after defecting to the Liberals last year, foreshadowing the Emerson switch.”

Does the North Shore News employ a fact checker?   The reason why Emerson was investigated and Stronach not was that Shapiro was asked to investigate Emerson, but was not asked to investigate Stronach.  The CBC explains the relevant Act.  "the 2004 amendments to Parliament of Canada Act that sets out Shapiro's powers and duties, requires him to investigate anytime he has had a formal request from a member of the Commons or Senate. The act allows him to discontinue an examination if he finds no merit to the allegations. But even if he discontinues it he still is obliged to provide the prime minister and Parliament with a report setting out the facts in question and his own conclusions.'

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“Under the gutless Federal Liberals the Supreme Court began flexing its abs, functioning as judicial activists rather than interpreting laws.”  
 

Yet more parroted dribble from Carolan.  What the hell is an “activist” judge?  As the Sun’s Peter McKnight pointed out, the only coherent and comprehensible definition of judicial activism is when the courts over rules government legislation.  The problem for Conservatives is that by that measure the most conservative Justices in both Canada and the States are also the most activist.  That little ditty should not trouble Carolan though.  For him, “the facts don’t matter”.