Stop talking. Just. Stop talking.

[sabotabby]

Illustration by Brian Boutin, and I couldn't stop laughing.

"I have called the Prime Minister to find out if there’s any laws with respect to immigration and citizenship status in the city.

People are caught. I don’t care if you’re white, pink or purple, I don’t care if you’re a Canadian citizen or not, all I’m saying is if you’re caught with a gun and convicted of a gun crime, I want you out of this city. And the portfolio for the cabinet minister is immigration and citizenship. I don’t think the other half of my statement came out quite clearly. It has nothing to do particularly with immigration or where you come from (which I think John was trying to say), all I want to do is get information where I’m not an expert on and I’m sure nobody is until we talk to the minister and I can only get that information from the Prime Minister’s office.

So I put a call into the PMO to get that information. Maybe, maybe we don’t have a leg to stand on. But I’m going to do everything in my power to find out if we can get rid of these people when they get out of jail. I don’t want to live in this city. I just want to clarify the same portfolio is called immigration and citizenship, it’s not just immigration."

These are all words, but when you put them together like this, they make no fucking sense.


But the day is still young, right?

Comments

Awesome cartoon is awesome/Awful mayor is awful

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Is he getting stupider?

I heard him on the radio yesterday saying these things, but I was driving and thought perhaps I had missed something, it seemed so utterly incoherent.

But apparently not.

Honestly, it sounds like the words of a man in the midst of a breakdown, someone who is starting to realize he is entirely out of his depths.

Or maybe I'm just hoping. I don't live in Hogtown any more, but it's still one of my hometowns and it hurts me to see its mayor not just make Mel Lastman look good but look really good.

[culpster.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[flummoxicated.livejournal.com]

I guess "force gang members to leave town" makes sense if you're a stupid, out of your depth, conservative politician. You're not "throwing money" at the problem, which fellow conservatives hate, and you're expressing nationalist sentiment. Too bad it's just more blah-blah-blah instead of an actual solution that will work.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

So there will be some place just outside Toronto where they send people with guns to live? Confusing.

[culpster.livejournal.com]

I think they tried this before. It was called Australia.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. That was quite a success, wasn't it?

Here they are sending people on benefits to live in places like Hastings, a small seaside town with high teenage pregnancy rates, rather than pay their rents in London. So we have small towns with very high proportions of their populations on benefits and very few jobs for them. They get "problem families" and pay the councils to take them in, too. So whole no-go towns are created.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

The New York mayor was talking a couple of terms ago about giving people who are on the dole a one-way ticket out of the city.

It's always on the table.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Completely ridiculous, creating more ghettoes, aarrgh!
Admittedly if I lived surrounded by gun wielding gangs I would like them to be forcibly removed, but could also see that that really wouldn't solve the problem overall (just the immediate problem for me at the time!).

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

Yeah, has Ford considered what would happen if every city adopted the strategy he proposes? All the people with guns would have to take to the high seas and become muthafuckin' gangsta pirates with names like Long John Bling. I just hope Ford doesn't own a yacht or anything.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

He will have to build compounds for them to live in...

lovely!

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

ESCAPE FROM....KITCHENER

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I love that cartoon. I will now show it to everybody I know.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

"I don’t want to live in this city."

I suspect nobody else wants you to, either. Sheesh.

How about this? How about if you commit a crime (especially a violent one) and are caught and your immigration/refugee status is still being looked at, it gets automatically cancelled upon conviction and you get deported? And how about otherwise we just do what we can with programmes in jails, and with addressing the root causes of violent lifestyles, instead of having this little fantasy that you can be your own little city-state that has its own citizenship separate from Canada's, and that you can then get to control who lives there?

Or, like, you can either resign, or just duck and cover until the next election, and then just not run, and retire with a nice pension? Pretty sure just sitting down and shutting the hell up for the rest of your term is an option, Ford.

Good gods. >< I really, really can't wait to get to Kingston, but I also really, really don't want to move one foot closer to this moron. What if his crazy is catching? And he starts infecting local mayors? It'd be like the zombie apocalypse, except stupid.

Kind of weird how much he reminds me of this:

[sabotabby]

How about this? How about if you commit a crime (especially a violent one) and are caught and your immigration/refugee status is still being looked at, it gets automatically cancelled upon conviction and you get deported?

The big problem with this is the whole inconvenient "innocent until proven guilty" thing. Considering where many people come from, we could easily be condemning an innocent person (or a person guilty of a lesser offence than murder) to torture or death.

The thing that the HWB doesn't get, and most conservatives don't get, is that we already do have laws covering all of these things. What happened in Scarborough was blatantly illegal on a number of levels, and once they catch the dudes, they will be going away for a long time. More laws won't prevent criminals from breaking them or retroactively save the victims' lives. What we need is preventative measures.

And how about otherwise we just do what we can with programmes in jails, and with addressing the root causes of violent lifestyles, instead of having this little fantasy that you can be your own little city-state that has its own citizenship separate from Canada's, and that you can then get to control who lives there?

This.

Don't worry, I don't think Kingston is that crazy. It's kind of a nice, sleepy town. It's not trying to be the centre of the universe like Toronto so wackos don't run for mayor, I don't think.

[ladypolitik.livejournal.com]

Ive had a hard time trying to express my rage and grief over the latest violence, and then I had the misfortune of seeing Ford do an photo-op stroll through the affected community, where he made that comment about social programs not being the solution, proceeding to call them "Hugs for Thugs". I cant even remember the last time I had this overwhelming urge to drop-kick someone, so much. Congratulates, Rob, you're part of the Problem, and wasted no time in proving why.

And his dropping the phrase "white, pink or purple [he forgot 'polka-dotted'!] -- I dont care/doesnt matter!" -- aka the Strangely-Coloured People Invocation -- during discursive attempts to demonstrate how racist a person supposedly *isnt*, tends to create the opposite effect and, if nothing else, makes an already established douche bag come off all the more contrived and condescending.

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised; here he is, now vomiting up a primitive assessment of immigration and citizenship/crime that is smothered in coded language and thinly-veiled bigotry, masked as "colour-blindness". It figures.

[sabotabby]

Thanks for that link. I'm going to drop it over The Face every time I hear about goddamned purple people. I don't think I've ever heard purple people invoked by someone who wasn't racist (and white).

[poetic-pixie-13.livejournal.com]

I just want to punch him in the face.



With a sledgehammer.

[cannibal-x.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, that illustration is amazing.