Canadian Official Escorted From House For Others' Facebook Comments 205
New submitter zayyd writes "The CBC reports that publicly-elected Gerry Rogers, member of the Provincial Government for Newfoundland and Labrador, 'has been removed from the house of assembly for refusing to apologize for comments made by other users on a Facebook group of which she had been added to as a member.' Rogers was unwillingly added to a Facebook Group which included comments of death threats aimed at Premier Kathy Dunderdale from other users. From the article: 'Dunderdale said her government understands how Facebook groups work, and she said it is up to every MHA to monitor the comments posted on Facebook groups to which they belong.' Facebook's policies for Groups are somewhat clear, even if they don't actually answer the question of 'Can I prevent people from adding me to a new group?'"
Re:Article Not Clear (Score:5, Informative)
Building. It's a common form of enforcement of House rules.
Meanwhlie, nobody in Canada cares (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a Canadian... yawn. This is not getting much attention in Canada. It's just a couple of parties in a provincial legislature finding something new to bicker about. The same sort of thing happened last week in New Brunswick over who called someone a "witch" first, so they could determine who had to retract it (they had to go back to video of the session to answer that one). This one just happens to involve Facebook, and so it's sexy to some media.
What happened is entirely routine. Someone was involved in something that goes against the decorum of the legislature, someone else complained. They wouldn't apologize, so they were tossed out of the building for the day. They leave the FB group and the whole thing goes away. Almost nobody outside the legislature gives a damn, except to point out that it's not a terribly professional or productive environment if this is taking up significant time.
If the same thing had happened only not involving Facebook, the story would not be posted here. Politics is absurd on either side of the border, only people outside Canada don't see the local variety of "absurd" very often. Today you get to.
Re:Oh Canada... (Score:2, Informative)
And for each stupid Floridian thing, Quebec does 20 more. Check Bill 14 and any American reading it would assume Hitler just got elected. Remember, before he put his batshit insane plan into execution he "only" did somewhat offensive things. After reading Bill 14 you'll figure why not just put the English into camps, may as well...
Re:Oh Canada... (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, aboot that, Canada is in America. Canadians ARE Americans. Did you mean US Citizens? If you did then you should have said that.
Oh, Dunderdale... (Score:4, Informative)
Living in Newfoundland myself, I've been hearing non-stop about her exploits as premier lately. It seems she's bat-shit crazy - That is, moreso than the rest of us. Among some of the other things she's tried to do have been to seal public spending records to make it impossible to see what the province is doing with its money, slashing education budgets, aggressive politics, compulsive lying and just generally being a slimeball.
Her predecessor (from the same political party - the provincial equivalent to the Conservative party) fought tooth and nail against the Harper government, even going so far as to recommend voting against him, but she regularly rolls out the red carpet and kisses ass whenever the prime minister and his cronies are around. It's obvious that like most of our premiers, she only wants to get in good with the federal government so that she can move up to a position there, and really has no other concerns than that. Her tactics are almost identical to the Harper government, to boot.
Sad thing is, this keeps happening because people here vote based on their voting history, not their actual ideals or which party would do the best job.
Re:Oh Canada... (Score:5, Informative)
No, I am not exaggerating. True, it's not always that bad. But in some cases it is.
Years ago it was. If you need something for a life-threatening condition, you'll have it fairly quickly. Even if it's not a life-threatening condition, you'll still have it fairly quickly these days.
I've had a handful of surgeries in my life, and have never needed to wait more than 4 months for it, without leaving the country. And that 4 month wait was because there's only one surgeon in the country who's licensed to perform that particular procedure (there's only 4 in the US who could do it, too, so don't start telling me that it'd have been faster in the US: it wouldn't). The reason some people have longer waitlists than that is that they want a specific doctor, or are not willing to travel beyond a specific hospital (even if there's another hospital in the same greater metropolitan area that does the same surgery). If you don't ask if there's another surgeon available with a shorter waitlist, you might think the timeline that they tell you is actually real.
On rare occasions a minor surgery may be bumped because of a life threatening situation coming up (happened for my knee surgery), but I was put on a cancellation list and had the surgery a week later. The cancellation list is, itself, another part of the reason that some people think they can't get surgery: I had 1 day of notice for the knee surgery the 2nd time around... the hospital called me at 4pm on a Wednesday, and said "can you be here tomorrow at 8am?". If folks aren't willing to adjust their schedules like that, then they can leave with the perception that they can't get treatment, even though the treatment is available to them, they're just not willing to work with the system.
In rural cases, it can be a bit worse, but there's still plenty of hospitals available if you're willing to travel a couple of hours. We have some *extremely* rural areas where you're 6 hours by helicopter away from the nearest hospital, but most of the population isn't anywhere near that distant.