Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning’s Ottawa Citizen ran a full page article on Bountiful, where a polygamy practicing sect of the Mormon church is located.  Titled The Bountiful Challenge, it’s remarkable in that it represents the first time I’ve seen members of the sect declare that they believe they have a Charter right to practice polygamy.  The article reports on a meeting between members of the Bountiful community and reporters that was held last tuesday.  Amongst other things it reports:

The case that Winston Blackmore made for the free practise of polygamy is based on his interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He says the Charter provides unlimited protection for any religious practice and that the guarantee of religious freedom overrides the Criminal Code prohibition on polygamy.

If the Charter overrides the Criminal Code, then what next?  Shall we allow human sacrifice, or the stoning of criminals?  Earlier in the article questions were asked about the ages of some of the "brides".

The youngest bride that anyone acknowledged Tuesday night was described as being one day shy of her 15th birthday. Midwife Christina Blackmore — one of Winston Blackmore’s wives — said marriages at such a young age are unusual and she knows of only two girls who had babies before they were 16.

Bountiful is nothing more than systematic pedophilia, which the members are attempting to disguise as religion.  The BC government should grow itself a spine, and deal with the issue.

What can I say?  Did I call it, or what?  Here’s Stephen Harper’s response to Martin’s speech.

Phew.  Matters of National Importance are being covered on the CBC, and I am on a train between Ottawa and Toronto.  Luckily, with my handy Blackberry, doubling as a GPRS modem, I have connectivity.  Slow, but as Om Malik said recently "Any connectivity is better than no connectivity".  So I’ve whistled over to the Globe and Mail website and downloaded Paul Martin’s speech… slowly.

Mr. Martin says:

1. He’s sorry.
2. The problems occurred on the Liberal Party’s watch, and they will take the blame.
3. He’ll call an election, once the Gomery inquiry is done.

In the meantime, can’t we all please get along so he can get back to the important business of running the country.

It’s an interesting gambit.  Appeal to Canadian’s collective sense of fair-play, and the electorate’s lack of interest in an early election in order to head off the threat of a non-confidence vote.  But will it work?

I haven’t seen any of the responses of the other parties, but here is what I predict they will do:

1. Moan bitterly about how Martin cut short the previous parliamentary inquiry to call an election when it was to his advantage.  Peter McKay is going to call a spade a spade, and label Martin a hypocrite.  Martin deserves it.
2. Redouble their efforts to find anything — anything — that might tie Martin directly to the scandal.  If they can do that, then Martin is cooked, plain and simple.  In the meantime, there will be a lot of innuendo.  They will make the most of Martin’s admission in his speech that he should have been "more vigilant".
3. Pull the plug on whatever is left of the Liberal government anyway.  Yes, they will do it.  The risk associated with letting the inquiry continue while portions of the testimony are perhaps weakened, and the Liberals continue to implement their agenda, is simply too great.  The time to strike is now.

The VON Canada News Blog is up.  Clever idea, and ideally suited to the blog format.

Mark Spencer, from Digium, is the other presentation I’ve been looking forward to. He’s talking about Asterisk, DUNDi, and the "opening of telephony".

He’s starting off with a plug for open source, and all the benefits. C’mon Mark! Get to the meat.

Interesting tidbit: Asterisk does Bluetooth presence. When your bluetooth enabled cellphone goes out of range of your PC, it routes all the calls to the cellphone instead of your extension. Cool!

DUNDi is pretty interesting. Essentially DNS for voice. It propagates requests through the network until it finds the right egress point, and then routes the call there.  Sounds like it has lots of potential.

Most of Mark’s presentation was on the benefits of open source.  But the business models he put up on his slides could have been the same business models for a company with proprietary software. He made the point that if the software was free, then the margins possible on system should be really large for a VAR, but that’s a specious argument.  Anyone with a basic understanding of economics knows that commodity prices are elastic, and margins for fungible commodities tend to zero over time. So, as a software guy I found Mark’s message (and Maddog Hall’s earlier) really tough to stomach. Software should be free is the essence of what they had to say. Easy for Mark to say, since his company makes hardware that can take advantage of that software.  But what of those who are simply software vendors? I noted several prominent IP-PBX software vendors in the audience, and wondered what must have been going through their minds.