Perhaps this will help you. Womens rights under Islam from an Iranian woman Azam Kanguian who was imprisoned under the mullahs, escaped to the west and has authored several books on the subject. It goes into more detail on this aspect of sharia law if you are interested. She has lived it and speaks out.
participation might be small, but the support for it isn't
Islam is not unique. You're just seeing a snapshot. Religion is useful to the ruling power when it helps justify their rule. The Catholic Church made aggressive violent use of it. There were the Spanish Inquisitions. There were executions by strict application of Leviticus, etc. Hell, there were the Salem witch trials, using religious excuses to suppress wilful women.
Most religious terrorism or extremism stems from poverty, destitution or devastation.
And today the Clerk of the Privvy Council decided to just retire from his pork barrel job.....up and quit from his place at the trough.
A Christian analogy would be Northern Ireland.
Or perhaps he's answering in French because the whole SNC affair is not viewed nearly as negatively in Quebec than it is in the rest of Canada. Combine that with an upcoming Federal election where, I suspect, the Liberals are hoping to gain seats to counter seat losses that are expected in other parts of Canada, kind of makes sense for PM to answer in French when it comes to SNC. Assuming use of French to confuse/avoid English speakers is a big stretch of an assumption; given all the PM's answers would be translated into English immediately anyways.
Probably shouldn't respond to such an old post. But when someone claims "these are the facts" when the post actually contains one single fact - that being in 2008 Dion/Layton/Duceppe did agree to form a coalition less than 2 months after an election. A more relevant fact would be that under our Parliamentary system, coalitions are perfectly permissible. Winning a Federal election merely grants a particular party the right to attempt to form a government; that government may only continue to govern if it maintains the confidence of Parliament. In Canada, we do not directly elect our PM, thus, a government can fall (in theory) at any time. Clearly your opinion is/was that a coalition government is a "hijacking" as you put it. Perhaps it's a better exercise to try and understand why the coalition was formed at that time. Publicly the coalition stated they were unhappy that the fiscal update that caused the whole issue lacked a fiscal stimulus plan (keep in mind this was late 2008). The actually reason the coalition wanted to topple the government was because said fiscal update (which is basically a mini-budget) contained a provision to amend the election laws, specifically eliminating the per vote funding political parties receive. Basically the conservatives attempted to effectively de-fund all federal political parties. Throughout the Harper minority years never once did the other Federal parties even think about forming a coalition - only when faced with a Government that attempted to de-fund them (in effect financially ruining them) did they band together. Regardless of political leanings, a PM asking a GG to prorogue Parliament simply to avoid a confidence vote was up until that time unprecedented. I personally believe Harper is an intelligent person and a highly strategic thinker. Unfortunately he is also very much an ideologue, which in my opinion, made him fail to see how the other parties would respond to facing financial ruin by eliminating the per vote subsidies.
But it's not and meanwhile Turdeau has done fuck all about all the job losses in the oil patch throughout Western Canada. He's all gung ho to save 9000 jobs (although that figure has been widely disputed by industry insiders) but 10's of thousands are out of work in Western Canada and we hear crickets. Oh, except overpaying for a mothballed pipeline with our money.
