I have always been opposed to abortion, an issue that has now been put on the Canadian back-burner—we have no laws governing the practice since the Morgentaler decision in 1988, one of only a few countries in the world in that situation. There are no laws even governing when in the pregnancy an abortion can take place.

I could cite my influences as being things like our beautiful daughter, born to a young single mother who was quite likely advised by some to seek an abortion, or things like hearing of the lady in our community who aborted a child because she had to stand at a wedding in October and wanted to look good, but even long before that I was influenced by enough knowledge of biology to know that (reinforced now with our tremendous knowledge of DNA and genetic coding) that a fetus is a human being, unique in itself, from the very beginning. If you can only grasp potential, it has all the potential in the world, including the often stated possibility of being the first person to find a cure for cancer, had we not placed them in the garbage instead.

I know the world is over-populated, I know we don’t seem to take care of the people we have (though we could), but I don’t think the answer there lies in getting rid of some of us as we are just developing.

I’ll entertain arguments for cases of rape, though I’m not sure the child should pay; I’ll talk about babies destined to be born handicapped, though I know of families with children with intellectual and physical challenges where the child is the highlight of their lives. I also know that abortions in Canada have often numbered about one-third of live births, in the tens of thousands, and anyone with any sense at all knows these are not all in support of “the physical and mental well-being of the mother”. That may be argued in many cases, but there is a high percentage where it’s nothing but a too-late form of birth control. People want the right to a “choice”, but the choice should have been made, both by the father and the mother, several months earlier. Abortion rates are thankfully falling, from over 90,000 Canadian abortions a year in 2005 and 2006 to about 44,000 in 2008, mainly due to young women having more knowledge and more confidence when it comes to managing their sexuality.

While abortion in Canada still remains an area of controversy, of enough moral concern that most women don’t enter into it without considerable thought, some countries have made it so routine that abortions number well into the millions each year. As a global species, we procreate—some of our children we give birth to, some we discard.

We’ll put that aside… as our government knows, it’s a topic that is highly polarized and seemingly we will never come to agreement or even compromise. Why I bring it up at the moment is more to do with unusual global developments.

We seldom appreciate the difference in cultures around the world. A simplistic notion is that we are all basically the same, and differ only in our language, clothing, and where we buy our cars, but of course that’s far from reality. There are strong differences among areas of the world due to religions and moral codes rooted deep in history, or, in modern times, sometimes the lack of them. While we continue to argue about abortion in Canada, some cultures have embraced the procedure to the point where dealing with impending childbirth seems to be about as important as choosing broccoli at the supermarket.

Mara Hvistendahl (Ignore the H? Start the V with your teeth on your lower lip—I don’t know!), a correspondent for Science magazine recently published a book called Unnatural Selection, where she relates the effect in Asia of abortion particularly targeted at gender selection. We heard years ago of the restrictions in China on family size, and male favouritism, leading to horror stories of rural bedside bucket drowning of female babies. In cultures more affluent, easy access to ultrasounds and abortions (now advertised on TV in China) has led to gender selection based at times on economics and even marketing (in differing ways according to supply or demand). Even in modern nations like South Korea and Taiwan, this practice has strongly skewed male to female ratios to where they approach figures in some areas of 2 to 1. Statistics on these Asian nations tell us that the eastern world is missing some 163 million females (the population of five Canadas) and the trend shows no signs of altering.

As a male, I’m afraid I can’t give you compelling arguments for striving for this imbalance, but as I said, cultures differ more strongly than we can ever appreciate, and it’s often tied to things like having a male family line and the likelihood of a male being more financially successful.

The concern, to sociologists and their ilk, is not so much the rampant abortions for very questionable reasons as much as the impact of this practice on a nation and culture. When men outnumber women to such an extent, there are the obvious results as well as other results that are unexpected and ultimately dangerous to a society. The most apparent thing is that not all men will ever have a wife, not to mention even a girlfriend, or anything resembling romantic or sexual experience. How the “winners” here are selected would be an interesting study: looks, wealth, power, plain luck, or more likely to be arranged by families?

When I lived on Sable Island years ago, the wild ponies were gathered into herds of several mares (or more) controlled by one stallion. This gender imbalance created a herd near the weather station that we referred to as the “bachelor herd”. This group of males wandered about as what was apparently an Island Losers’ Club, its members lacking, for whatever reason, the courage, fighting ability, or desire to take over a normal herd. I don’t know what they did in their spare time—told exaggerated tales of the ones who got away, the huge harems they could have if they really wanted to—whatever. No one bothered to paint “L” on their foreheads, but I’m sure it was there.

Obviously in these Asian nations unbalancing the gender tables, the L is more obvious. This has led to higher rates of sexual crime like rape and prostitution, as those left out of the market decide to approach things in other ways. Hvistendahl, as quoted in a Maclean’s interview, relays stories of women taken in by families with the role of being wife to more than one son, of others being bought and traded, even at extremely young ages, to be raised by a family as an eventual wife for sons, as a way of planning for the future.

A few nearby countries are turning the tables on the gender balance and taking advantage of this low supply/high demand situation in neighbouring nations by treating girls as a cash crop. Males with the L brand, but having at least monetary capability, can book trips to Vietnam for abut $10,000 where they will be taken to a hotel and an array of girls paraded before them for selection of a “bride”. Families in rural areas of Vietnam and on islands in the Mekong Delta are producing large numbers of children (no mention if they are employing reverse selection processes to achieve high female numbers) and selling off their girls to men in Taiwan, Korea, and China, giving the family (farm?) a higher than normal standard of living.

Perhaps I’m making a stretch to connect abortion in North America and other western areas to this economic niche in the Far East, but it’s the old concept of when something is started, you really don’t know where it’s going. It’s the Butterfly Effect of something leading to something else. You can’t always predict it.

Hvistendahl herself states that, “Abortion is an issue with a long and fraught history in the United States. That history should not affect Americans’ concern for what happens in China and India, but sadly it does. I inherited my mother’s agnosticism, and I have always believed in a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but again and again in the course of reporting this book I ended up treading onto unexpected political ground. At moments I found myself perusing right-wing religious websites and agreeing with anti-abortion activists and corresponding with public relations officers whose voice-mail messages ended with, ‘God bless.’” Things change when you start to see the bigger picture.

Hvistendahl mentions that historically, when there has been an abundance of men in a society, there has been more violence and more war. The millions of men in China who will never have a wife and family have a lot of time on their hands.

There are plenty of catch-phrases that might fit this leading edge of what might bring a lot of trouble to the world. The simplest is likely “If you play with fire … ”

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Hvistendahl’s book: Unnatural Selection

Though I don’t mind giving out my opinion on elections while sitting at Tim’s, I’ve always tried not to put thoughts into print—the danger there is that event- ually people vote, unfortunately too soon for people to forget what I forecast, and in the morning after I can be proven definitely wrong.

So I’ll make some comments, probably enough for you to get an idea of my leanings—I was about to add, “but I won’t make any prediction”, but as you probably know by now, I don’t have that kind of control.

It’s an interesting election, ignoring the issues of the tremendous cost and whether we really needed one or not. There are some interesting personalities in the mix. I think more than many elections, the focus is on the national leaders, and a lot of local ridings will tilt from the desire to have one leader over another.

I have to say that I don’t like Stephen Harper, and my voting might end up as more of an “anything but Harper” than the real supporting of another party. I think that if he gets the majority that he desperately wants, it will only happen the once. Harper, under minority conditions, only lets us see glimpses of his true personality and true agenda. Under majority conditions, he can basically push through almost any piece of legislation he wants (particularly with a senate stuffed with his choices, all of who have realized by now which side of the bread has a lot of butter). I think we will see a lot of movement to the political right, a huge amount of control, and very little input from parliament other than as a clearing house formality. Members of other parties will be the nuisances he has to put up with, and members of his own party will toe the line or find themselves dispatched to a political Siberia.

Harper shows enough glimpses of this during the campaign: paranoia and control beyond the imaginations of journalists covering his trek. At his Halifax visit, reporters and uninvited people were kept thirty feet away behind a metal fence, while loyal (and thoroughly checked) supporters were seated in front. Reporters clustered there were allowed two questions. The opposition later was able to make hay with the Ontario incident where two young women were strong-armed out of a public gathering for Harper when it was discovered (just the fact that staffers too the trouble to look for such information gives me serious concerns) that they had a photograph taken with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff on their Facebook pages.

Green Leader Elizabeth May disclosed in an interview that she was shocked with Harper’s behaviour at the television debate in the last election. The candidates were told that they could not bring anything into the debate room, that there would be water, index cards for making notes, and a pen on short tables beside each. May looked over to find that Harper had a nice set of typed index cards (there was no sign of his having brought a typewriter in with him… but I jest). Apparently Harper either thought that the rules did not apply to him, or he (and staffers) were willing to take the chance on being censured for this breach. In either situation, it spoke to his need, like the limited questions from reporters he always enforces in press conferences, to leave nothing to chance—everything must be scripted—“controlled” is the far better term.

I’d like to say that I’m more impressed with Ignatieff, but that would be a lie, though I lack the abundance of examples to prove his unsuitability. He is supposed to be an “intellectual”, a “cerebral” thinker, mainly because of his career as a writer and university professor. I see little evidence of this, other than the fact that he’s stilted and uncertain in dealing with the common man. If he’s a highly gifted, cerebral man typical of the Harvard instructors, it has certainly become easier to land a job there. I regarded Pierre Trudeau as cerebral, but I’ve seen little of that in politicians since. Trudeau seemed able to stand back from the games of parliament and pop out the occasional tongue-in-cheek comment that revealed his perceptions were well above the spitting matches at the front desks, or occasionally showed his distain (as in the famous “fuddle-duddle” comment) for the games played by the men we elect, pay well, and pension off even better.

Ignatieff seems to be playing a role; I see a surface political performer, not great at that act, but (and this is common to most politicians) I don’t see the true man underneath. He lashed out with a speech last week where he called on Canadians to “Rise up! Rise up!”, a tirade that prompted the Conservatives to label him as “screeching” and “losing it entirely”. Certainly a predictable response from that side, since Harper is so controlled that one commentator said he thought he was attempting to hypnotize him with his robotic responses in the debates, seldom looking at his opponents as he spoke to where he felt the cameras were positioned. Word was that the intent of campaign strategists for the debates was to keep Harper cool, calm, and guaranteed to never lose his temper. There seemed to be great concern about him losing his temper, something I wasn’t aware he had on that level. Perhaps had he lost his temper, he would have attempted to banish them all from the kingdom, and would have become frustrated when no guards rushed in to do his bidding… or perhaps we would all be surprised when they did. But I’m onto Harper again—I told you the stories were better there. I felt that the “Rise up! Rise up!” was also a performance on Ignatieff’s part, not a true demonstration of reaching his limits with the indifference of the Canadian voters.

One person I take to be honest with his feelings and to be playing little of a role, frankly, is Gilles Duceppe. Unfortunately his party is not running other than in Quebec, and their ultimate intention of breaking up Canada makes The Bloc a rather poor choice.

Jack Layton is at times admirable. He plays less of a role, though it is still apparent, and seems to have the welfare of the man on the street foremost in his mind. Whether he would bankrupt the nation with a mandate to govern remains to be seen. Unfortunately, more than ever before, his NDP is caught between the two major parties, and will be squeezed out either by the desire of some to give Harper a majority and end this need to cooperate in government (something that seems alien to our parliamentary process), or by the desire to defeat Harper at any cost and not waste votes on the NDP. The New Democrats have always faced that barrier of “not able to form the government”, a perception that takes one win to erase, as it has been erased in Nova Scotia when an NDP majority government was surprisingly elected almost two years ago. Forever after, they will have to be taken seriously in this province, though so far their reign here has been so troubled that many feel they will lower the chances of NDP candidates being elected federally!

I don’t know if I can throw in much on Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party. She and her party, in any situation, would have the proverbial snowball’s chance, but in the time of a Harper-stays-or-goes election, the perception of her ranks being made up of left-over hippy tree huggers doesn’t arouse a lot of support, despite her being intelligent, guileless, and probably the only party leader that you would really like to share a Tim’s with and get to know.

Polls come out on an almost daily basis showing the popular vote, and how little it has changed in the weeks of campaigning. But we all know what dogs do to polls. Popular vote indications are really only meaningful for a country that uses a different form of election, like Australia’s Preferential Voting, and the pollsters should know this. Our “first past the pole” (the other pole) method of election can widely skew the appearance of popular support. Many who realize this feel this election is much closer, at least between Conservative and Liberal, than people are led to think.

For example, humour me for a moment with the math. Suppose, on a small scale, we have four little ridings, with 100 voters in each. In Riding #1, 99 people vote Conservative—they of course win this seat. In each of the other three, 51 persons vote Liberal, and 49 vote PC. The Liberals win all three. Popular vote? Add them up: PC, 99 + 49 + 49 + 49 = 246 votes. Liberals 1 + 51 + 51 + 51 = 154 votes. In percentages, the PC’s had 61.5% of the popular vote, the Liberals only 38.5%. But the Liberals won three seats to the Conservative’s lone seat! While this is an exaggerated little example, the math is perfectly correct, and with strong Harper support in some areas of the West, there could be concentrations there that skew the results much like my example, while seats in places like powerful Ontario are won by the Liberals with narrow margins.

So… I predict? Unfortunately, Harper minority again. More use of the dirty word “Coalition”.

The leaders? If Ignatieff holds his leadership position for six months, you will see if he goes back on his claim to not enter any coalitions, a claim that he was forced to make when Harper used the C word as a powerful tool in the opening weeks. You will also see a PC party that has reached its limits with Harper’s inability to get a majority, and there will be another “night of the long knives” like the one that ended Diefenbaker’s career.

I could be wrong. It has happened. (Much too frequently in politics)

 It was not a protest against the administration or teachers, in fact it was an action designed to bring attention to their desire to have a cafeteria in the school, mainly done in hopes of attention from the community, municipal council, and school board.

 While teachers and The Office were very sympathetic to the purpose, a school can’t run with about five-hundred students in the gymnasium, so eventually the principal called their attention, described how he agreed with the idea, etc., etc., and then formally ordered them to leave and return to classes.

 They didn’t go.

 It was all very peaceful, but in the gym at the time, I realized how tenuous the hold we have on large groups in society actually was.  Short of opening secret cabinets in The Office and breaking out the rods, livestock prods, and cat-o-nine tails, we weren’t going to get those students out of the gym until they were good and ready (and they took those fun things out of education long ago  ;^).

 Governments as large as national and as small as a school administration operate on the notion that most of the people are going to obey the rules almost all the time, that they have been socialized, even civilized into feeling that for some reason, peace and good government I suppose, they should obey instructions from “law enforcers”.

 Egypt at the moment is experiencing the gymnasium moment.  The government says, “Go back to your homes.  Stop this action.”  The people say, “No.”  Mubarak says, “I will step down in September.”  The people say, “No.”

 Although there was instability in Egypt fermenting for some time, it seems natural that the recent overthrowing of the ruling government in Tunisia was the catalyst.  And the trouble is spreading.  People are protesting in Yemen, to this point peacefully.  There are protests growing in the Sudan, in Jordan, in Syria.  In all of these situations there has been a ruling government, often acting basically as dictatorship or a monarchy, that had notions of staying in office forever. 

 “No,” say the people.  “We will not leave the gym.  If we leave, once this has started, you will quietly hunt down those you feel are our leaders, they will disappear, and you will never leave.  We know your methods.”

 While we have the luxury, as in most situations, of watching the drama unfold on television news, certainly a lot of governments, particularly in the western world, are watching with growing concern.  Canada called parliament back two days ago for an emergency debate on the situation in Egypt.  I read a few of the postings on this announcement on the CBC News website.  There were comments like, “Oh, I bet that makes the Egyptians feel better!” and, “Why doesn’t the government have a debate about Canada?”  I don’t think the people were feeling that the babble in the Commons was going to make the world news.

 I am surprised that the US government has been coming out strongly the last couple of days in favour of Mubarak stepping down, asap.  I suppose they feel the present situation could lead to full civil war, and make things more unstable than even a temporary vacuum in government.  The Egyptian army has been sitting on the fence so far, but is likely to turn strongly to whichever side they feel is winning, and escalate the violence at that point.  Their fence-sitting now is more a worry about who might be their masters when this trouble ends.

I’m sure the US has a lot of concern.  Prime in the minds of the Americans in dealing with mid-east tensions are two things:  Oil and Israel.  I would be hard-pressed to give a relative strength between the two of them in the mind of American foreign policy.  Egypt in the past has been, if not an ally of the US, and if certainly not a buddy of Israel, at least not troublesome in recent times, which in the mid-east is often the best the US can hope for.  I suspect most of the tanks and armoured vehicles roaming through the protestors on Cairo streets have “Made in America” decals on their bottoms, but that is true of many of the countries of the world.  The US is the world’s leading seller of arms, too often to questionable regimes where it comes back to haunt them.

 One concern in the minds of western governments is that these nations rattling sabres are Islamic.  There is a group in the present Egyptian struggle that would like to see the struggle ending with Egypt becoming an Islamic state, with all the bells and whistles like Sharia law.  I don’t think it’s too likely in Egypt, as the nation is more westernized than many Arab countries, and the more radical Muslims seem to be in a minority.  It is a possibility in countries like Yemen where religion has been more of a part of government, and where various Islamic factions have clashed in the past.

 How far this domino effect will carry is anyone’s guess.  People eventually become fed up with governments that pull any trick they can to stay in power forever, that are unresponsive to the people, that seem to always have a hidden agenda for eliminating their enemies and having their way with the nation.

 We march on Harper on Monday.  Start Tweeting now.  ;^)