Shucking and jiving our way to a new foreign policy

No matter how toxic Canada's foreign policy was in the Baird-Harper era, it had one redeeming feature; it was predictable.

Saudi Arabia was good.

Israel was even better.

Iran was Satan-on-Earth...

With POTHEAD at the helm, all that stability is in flux.

We were outraged at that mass execution in Saudi Arabia the other day, but just blink, and you're seeing this story. Yup, we should be strengthening our ties with Saudi Arabia!

Meanwhile, after a stink-up about children finding themselves on the terrorist no-fly list, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale comes out with the news that airlines will no longer have to vet anyone under 18 years of age.

Which sounds really great! After all, we're inviting in a shitload of folks from all those Islamic countries we and our allies have been bombing, and if we were to deny their children airplane rides... heck, they wouldn't even be able to get here in the first place!

And then you read something like this.

Oopsie! A fourteen year old can be a suicide bomber?... Guess Ralph Goodale could be a little bereft of actual facts, eh?

Oh, it's a mess alright...

But the think tank here at Falling Downs has a suggestion.

Maybe if we stopped bombing the Muslim nations, they'd stop screwing with us?

Give it some thought, Mr. POTHEAD.

Harper announces that he will soon announce improvements to Syrian refugee plan that has been announced innumerable times already

It's the classic Harper strategy; bury the 'tards in a blizzard of announcements and hope they don't notice that you're not actually doing anything.

Our shipbuilding programs are a prime example. Big Steve has announced various iterations of our shipbuilding program for at least ten years, each accompanied by much theatrical posing and fanfare. Have any ships been built?

The Harper gang doesn't have a shipbuilding program. They have a shipbuilding announcement program.

Likewise with our program to assist Syrian refugees. We're gonna take in thousands. Months later, another announcement; we're gonna take in thousands; a few weeks later; we're gonna take in ten thousand more Syrian refugees. Over three years. After they've cleared security background investigations. Maybe...

Then the infamous Aylan Kurdi photo goes viral.

Harper announces that we are committed to what he's been repeatedly announcing. Unfortunately, those comprehensive background checks pretty much disqualify Syrians.

But don't worry; yesterday Harper announced that there'll be an announcement coming soon about speeding up the processing of would-be Syrian refugees.

I'm sure that news is music to the ears of the millions of Syrians caught between Assad's anvil and the Islamic State hammer.

Harper's Rx for election victory: keep taxes low and towelheads out

Looks like Big Steve isn't about to alienate his base by showing weakness in the face of the unprecedented clamouring of Canadians at large that he "do something" to alleviate the suffering of Syrian refugees.

He is doing something. He's announcing, over and over, that Canada will admit up to 10,000 Syrians over a period of years, provided they pass strict security screenings. That's essential to keeping Canadians safe, of course, when these folks are coming from a country that features literally thousands of armed terrorist gangs.

And even more importantly, that's almost impossible to do. After all, how do you do an exhaustive background check on somebody who has lived in Aleppo all their life till three months ago? What were they doing six months ago? If they were Assad supporters... well, we wouldn't want that sort welcomed in Canada, would we?

And if they were against Assad, they were probably in cahoots with some terror outfit like al Nusra Front or, God forbid, ISIL itself! We obviously can't let that lot in either!

But in spite of these obstacles, we are making progress. With two hundred thousand Syrians dead, two million in refugee camps, and four million displaced from their homes, Canada has already provided security clearance for nine Syrian refugees.

That's not nine thousand, that's nine.

Yet those braying socialist Harper-haters still claim the man lacks compassion...

Some thoughts on the international refugee crisis

There's a minor flap afoot in Canada about our shameful response to the Syrian refugee crisis. At this point in time, Canada has admitted a grand total of 750 or thereabouts Syrian refugees.

For all of our grandiose talk of human rights, we pull up lame when it comes to delivering.

Right now well over a million Syrian refugees are holed up in both Turkey and Lebanon. Well over half a million in Jordan. There are almost a quarter million Syrian refugees in Iraq!

How desperate would you have to be to seek refuge in Iraq? Iraq is itself a major source of refugees in the global refugee equation.

The news that Canada is cherry-picking potential refugees based on their religious affiliation should give pause for thought too. A refugee is a refugee. A human being is a human being. Politicizing the refugee process makes Canadian government bureaucrats no different than the Nazi operatives who were charged with deciding who goes to a work camp and who goes to a death camp.

Here's another thing about the refugee crisis. All the top refugee source countries are countries in which the Nations of Virtue (EU, NATO) have been heavily meddling. Until we decided on regime change in Syria, the top source countries were Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria now tops the list. It's not hard to see what these nations have in common.

Here's a policy suggestion that I hope somebody in Ottawa will read; lets eliminate the Temporary Foreign Worker program entirely, and meet our labour needs by bringing in refugees! That's a win-win and win again.

Out with 400,000 TFWs, in with 400,000 refugees.

We have every reason to believe that a Syrian or Iraqi refugee, allowed into Canada, would be every bit as productive a worker as the TFWs from Mexico or Bangladesh. And this would ease the pressure on countries like Lebanon and Jordan, allies who are groaning under their refugee burden, and who are at considerable risk of becoming adjunct states to the Caliphate.

The only downside is this; if the Harper government actually instituted such a humane and sensible policy, those 400,000 new refugee-immigrants might be inclined to vote for him...