National Post: Terry Glavin: The kirpan is mightier than the Bloc-head

Just the other day security guards at the Quebec legislature denied entry to four Sikhs with kirpans on their sashes. Quebec is going all French about regulating niqabs and so on and fair play to them but the Parti Québécois wants to go whole hog and “regulate” kirpans. If that wasn’t stupid enough the Bloc Quebecois now want kirpans banned from the House of Commons in Ottawa.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/01/21/terry-glavin-the-kirpan-is-mightier-than-the-bloc-head/#ixzz1C4YAoxkG

Just the other day security guards at the Quebec legislature denied entry to four Sikhs with kirpans on their sashes. Quebec is going all French about regulating niqabs and so on and fair play to them but the Parti Québécois wants to go whole hog and “regulate” kirpans. If that wasn’t stupid enough the Bloc Quebecois now want kirpans banned from the House of Commons in Ottawa.
Apparently, these people think kirpans are “knives,” so it’s a security issue. Sweet Mother of God. You couldn’t even cut into a banana with a kirpan.

The blockheads and the pequistes are being just as stupid about this as those Royal Canadian Legion people a few years ago who wanted Sikh veterans to remove their turbans before being allowed into legion halls. Some geezers thought turbans were hats, if you don’t mind. If I’m giving the Bloc MPs way too much benefit of the doubt here by regarding them as merely dimwits and eejits, get a load of this: “The Conservative government and the NDP refused to take a public position in the dispute.” Mewling, spineless wankers.

Good for Iggy. He says the kirpan should be allowed in every legislature in Canada. And just you wait – I’ll bet you a loonie to a nickel that the guns-for-everybody crowd will be on Iggy’s case any time now, caterwauling about security threats and political correctness and the mollycoddling of immigrants and such gibberish. As though the presence of kirpan-wearing turbaned Sikhs was something new for Canada, like they haven’t been here from pretty well the beginning already.

If you wanted to assault some politician in any one of Canada’s legislative precincts you certainly would not use a kirpan. You’d pick up a desk and drop it on the auld slag. That’s what I’d do anyway.

Just saying is all.

UPDATE: The NDP points out that its caucus members fall within the taxonomical classification of the phylum chordata, after all.

National Post

Journalist, author and blogger Terry Glavin is an adjunct professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia and editor of Transmontanus Books.