Month: March 2006

Blogging Tories Television is now ready for distribution. The project was certainly educational and involved assembling more than a few novel ideas. At various stages, more experienced programmers, namely Craig (and some other friends) helped this novice out.

The principle however was simple. First we took hosted flash video (Google/Youtube) and integrated it onto the Blogging Tories website. Then we created a playlist of relevant videos and offered them up to our audience. Now, we’ve packaged all of this together into two lines of code that you can copy and paste onto your blog’s sidebar (you can easily adjust the width of the plug-in).

Blogging Tories, as a collective of individualists, reaches over 50,000 people each and every day. Now, we’ve added easily integrated, readily available video and this will hopefully allow us to reach thousands more!

Do you want to participate? There are two ways.

1. Get the plug-in and put it on your blog (instructions are here)
2. Start making your own politically relevant videos and upload them to Google Video (Youtube integration coming soon) and then send me the Video URL.

If you are a Blogging Tory and you put the plug-in code onto your blog (near the top), I will bold your name on the blogroll for two weeks. Just drop your blog’s link in the comments section and I’ll bold your blog. If you’re not a Blogging Tory, join up!

Here is the BT-TV code if you’d like to put it on your site:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">var width="250";</script><script language="javascript" src="https://www.bloggingtories.ca/scripts/bttv.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
(Change 250 to whatever width (in pixels) that you’d like)

I believe that blogging is enabling people to have a greater and more meaningful level of participation in democracy. When Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided that greater transparency should exist in the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, he encouraged Canadians to watch the interview of Justice Rothstein in front of an ad-hoc judicial committee. The full video (over 3 hours) is available on demand on Blogging Tories television. An extensive Q&A session with John Tory is also featured on BT-TV. Hopefully, as this blogging medium evolves, more and more people will become connected with grassroots political processes.

Everyone should read Andrew Coyne’s column today, it’s probably his best one in a while. In it, Coyne uncovers an important thread in the Prime Minister’s speech this past weekend to our troops in Afghanistan.

Implicit in Mr. Harper’s address is a very different sort of nationalism: a nationalism of moral purpose. Canada exists to do good, for its own people and for the world. It is defined by its beliefs and measured by its acts, not by the virtues of its people, real or imagined.

Coyne describes the fallacies of the Canadian bed-time story that our leaders (mostly Liberal “nationalist mythmakers”) have told us over the years:

A new world nation such as ours, a nation of immigrants, settled in the recent past, is never going to be defined by ties of blood or culture. That is, it cannot define itself in terms of its identity: the features common to all of its people and unique to them, that mark them apart from other peoples. And yet that is what our nationalists attempted. Stepping into the post-imperial void, they created us in their own self-image, as inveterate statists, diffident, polite, and above all not-American.

Will we see some new Historica minutes?

UPDATE: Comparing Coyne’s column to this bitter diatribe only reinforces my confidence that Harper represents the position of sanity in this debate (upon which the media has insisted in the absense of a retrospective Parliamentary debate on deployment).

Here is the audio of Stephen Harper’s speech from Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Prime Minister addressed the troops giving them a morale boost and thanking them for their service.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper addresses Canadian soldiers in Kandahar Afghanistan (MP3)

Personally, I am proud of what our men and women in uniform are doing in that desperate country and I’m proud of our Prime Minister who is showing his direct support for the Canadian mission which is bringing democracy and human rights to to the troubled citizens of Afghanistan.

Stephen Harper is the first Prime Minister in recent memory who has visited the troops in a warzone. Who was the last PM to do this? (If someone can let me know in the comments, I’ll update this post)

UPDATE: Chretien visited Kabul in 2003 but Harper is the first PM in a long time to visit an active part of the “military theatre” (ie. a location of ongoing military operations) in a long time.

Susan Delacourt remarked this morning in the Toronto Star: “No prime minister in recent memory has spent this much time at ground level or at the front lines of a Canadian military operation.”