So the layers of the Elections Canada campaign spending issue are being peeled away and, along with those layers is the obvious hypocrisy in some federal political circles. Yesterday I wrote about Andrew Coyne’s article in Macleans with respect to opposition parties hyperventilating on the so-called “In and Out” scheme. Now, today, we are hearing about the Bloc Quebecois — the party who yesterday put forward a motion to support Elections Canada.  

Well, if you want further evidence of in and out schemes, read this piece by Elizabeth Thompson in the Montreal Gazette.  She writes:

When the controversy first erupted about the Conservative “in and out” transfers between their local and national campaigns, the term had a vaguely familiar ring to it. Listening today to one Bloc Québécois MP after another get up to denounce “in and out” financing and praise Elections Canada,  those bells started to ring even louder.

Finally it came to me. The term “in and out” in connection with election financing was first used by my former colleague and classmate Andrew McIntosh to describe a lucrative arrangement cooked up by the Bloc to take advantage of a loophole in election financing laws to extract the maximum amount of taxpayer-funded refunds from Elections Canada.

I seem to recall that the Bloc weren’t as great fans of Elections Canada then as they seem to be now. Who knows. Perhaps the Bloc is now denouncing a practice it inspired.

 While the hypocrisy is truly breathtaking, I am glad the truth is finally coming out.

* Update: Related. Tories blast Elections Canada.

[...]

According to the Saturday edition of the Toronto Star, Louise Brown says that the Toronto District School Board is proposing to put “Canada’s first Africentric alternative school within a school — not a free-standing building — for a wing of sprawling Sheppard Public School near the northwest corner of Sheppard Avenue West and Keele Street” in Toronto.

Scheduled to open in September 2009 for children in Grades JK to 5, area trustee James Pasternak said the new school would bolster falling enrollment at Sheppard and add a vibrant program that would NOT be separate from all the other students attending Sheppard.

“There’s this misconception of two solitudes running down the halls, but that’s incorrect — these kids (in the regular school and the Africentric wing) would be together in the schoolyard, together in the playground, together in the lunchroom,” said Pasternak.

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Yesterday, Barbara Yaffe wrote in the Vancouver Sun that neither of the main parties were doing much to impress the voters. I sent her an e-mail questioning her comments. Although I can understand that Canadians are not impressed with Liberal “gotcha” politics and their desperation to get back into power to be “entitled to their entitlements,” the notion that the Conservative government isn’t doing much is ridiculous and misleading. Perhaps if the media got the message out about exactly what the governing party WAS doing or HAS DONE, Canadians would indeed be impressed!

So, I will remind all mainstream journalists, here are some of the things the Harper government has done so far.   I will also remind mainstream journalists that this list of accomplishments does not contain any spin or promises. It is reality. Moreover, there is no manipulation or misleading of the facts because the only sources I used were from government websites and government search engines and the mainstream media itself.

The bottom line: The conservative government has been in power only a little over two years. If Canadians are not impressed, then I challenge the media to get the message out explaining exactly what the Harper Conservatives have done.

[...]

C/P at Jack’s Newswatch.

During the October 2007 Ontario election, Canadians will no doubt remember the yelling and screaming about the John Tory proposal to provide public funding to some faith-based schools. You would have thought the sky was falling.

We were told that to provide independent schools with any amount of public money, and parents with school choice, would be divisive and, quite possibly, even destroy the public school system as we know it?

Destroy the system as we know it?  Dare I ask: Would that be such a bad thing, particularly since the system as we know it is a system entrenched in educational practices that do not necessarily meet the needs of many children? The system as we know it also means maintaining the status quo for the benefit of teachers’ unions, trustee associations and board administrations.

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While it is well known that some people with autism also have savant syndrome, few are as gifted as Stephen Wiltshire. He has a creative gift of exceptional beauty. He can go up in an airplane or helicopter and fly over a geograhical area and later transcribe most, if not all, that he saw, right down to the number of window panes in a building. He is called a human camera for his unique visual memory. But, his gifts are far more than photographic. He can draw as well, freehand, without prior sketches. As a former art teacher and artist (when I was teaching school in the 1970’s and 1980’s), I can tell you that is very hard to do when you are drawing buildings and streets — where you need to know the perspective and distances involved.

Watch this short video (5 minutes in total) and be amazed at what this young man can do. With so much negative news around, it is a good news story to enjoy.

H/T to a regular reader. 

(See update below.) I rarely disagree with the Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard but she has blinders on when it comes to Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario. While I would like to criticize the McGuinty Liberal government for hypocrisy, I won’t. Because Eden High School is NOT, I repeat, is NOT a faith based publicly funded high school — although to be completely up front, I did make those claims during the heat of the 2007 Ontario election campaign. Rather, it is an alternative public high school, like every other publicly funded alternative high school.

If it was a true FB school, the students at Eden would be able to do spiritual activities during school hours like all Catholic schools do now.

And, spare me the cry that Eden is at fault for other public high schools closing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any of those schools. Eden could cease to exist and those schools would still have to close. Few, if any students, were taken from other existing neighbourhood high schools. They come from all over the county, either in buses that would otherwise be nearly empty, by parent funded buses or by parent car pool.

Parents and journalists need to get over the fact that Eden is a success story. It is true that it is an alternative school, but a very different type of alternative school. A contract was made over twenty years ago with the local Mennonite Brethren community. As Education Minister Kathleen Wynn says, Eden has been grandfathered. If Eden closed, the parents would either fund their own private school, send their youth to existing private Christian schools or to local Catholic high schools.

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So, the notion of regularly reading blogs has hit the mainstream. CBC, for example, is reporting that:

“Researchers from the University of California-Irvine presented their study, which they said was the first to look in depth at the readers of blogs, on Wednesday at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Florence, Italy.”

“They found that regular blog reading can become ‘an Internet ritual,’ with the content secondary to the process of checking for new posts. The researchers said this is much like the routine of checking e-mail regardless of whether a new message is expected or not.”

“Sometimes, even the usefulness of the blog content itself can be less vital than the activity of reading or skimming the blog to fulfill a person’s particular routine….”

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This is the first in what could be a series of articles on how parents can develop a “Home Curriculum Plan” to home school. This “Home Plan” will be like a blueprint or a map. It is like a blueprint because before you can build a house, you need to build a foundation upon which everything else is connected. Or, it is like a map because in order to get to a destination, you have to know where you are going to begin with. 

 But, let me assure parents, flexibility can be built into any Home Plan.Essentially, what I will be doing here is what I used to do when I taught teacher education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

First and foremost, like anyone who teaches, parents need to be able to articulate what they believe about teaching and learning — their personal philosophy or orientation — because before anyone can determine what their priorities are they have to know what is important to them as individuals and as parents and what isn’t. For example, one parent might believe that “learning by doing” activities and field trips are the key components of their child’s learning. Another, might prefer a more structured situation.

So, in a notepad, write down the answers (in rough or point form) to the following questions.

1. Why do you want to homeschooling? Or, why do you home school?
2. What are your goals as a homeschooler? Short term? Long term?
3. How do you want your children to benefit? Short term? Long term?
4. What do you believe is the purpose of a good education?
5. How do you think children should be taught and why should they be taught that way? 

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Like so many people, I don’t particularly like change. So, when I was faced with having to upgrade to Word Press 2.5, the latest version, I was a little nervous. Particularly because it was reported to be quite different and I am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination. Well, I can report that I have made the transition and it was relatively painless. Here is what you can expect:

(1) When you sign in, the blue background is gone and the font and design is very different. You will realize immediately that this is a newly designed space. But, relax because the changes are intuitive.

(2) If you are not careful you will miss the word Dashboard because rather than being right beside Write, you will find it in the far upper left corner, almost hidden inside a black bar.

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One of the most important things we can do in life is listen and learn by reading a variety of opinions on any given topic. Then, be willing to confirm, change or adjust our views based on those opinions. For example, I have learned a lot about autism during the last week since Kathleen Seidel was subpoened for daring to write about the anti-vaccine debate and litigation.

I have also discovered, given the traffic from people around the world to my post and two updates on Seidel, both at Crux-of-the-Matter and Jack’s Newswatch, that there are indeed a lot of opinions about autism. For example, there is Harold Doherty at Facing Autism in New Brunswick.  A dedicated father, he writes on his blog:

“My interest in autism, and my engagement in autism advocacy, began with my son Conor’s Autism Disorder diagnosis and the realization that, locally at least, no serious efforts were being made to improve the lives of persons with Autism or to address the realities of Autism Disorder. Hugs are good, but hugs are not enough. Evidence based treatment, education and residential care by properly trained service providers are required to help the 1 in 150 persons who have an autism spectrum disorder. “

While I can understand most of what he says, I do disagree that no serious efforts where done until recently. In fact, I owned and operated a private special education practice for over a decade (in the Niagara Region of Ontario) from the mid 1980’s to the late 1990’s. I specialized in reading and writing disorders and worked with a wide variety of children, youth and adults with disabilities, including those with an autism spectrum disorder. I used a variety of learning strategies and technical aids, as well as multi-sensory techniques, mastery learning and behavioural modification approaches — all more likely to be long term even after treatment stops.
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