Peace, order and good government, eh?

It felt strange to type "Saturday night blues blogging" but I'll get used to it. Let's open with Katie Webster on Two-fisted Mama.

Due to circumstances beyond, well, you know, ....Friday night blues blogging is moving to Saturday night. Please try to bear up under the strain. All three of you.

Guess I missed another Friday night. Sorry. Things have been a tad out of control the last couple of days (tho' nothing serious). This is Steve Dawson with an instrumental called Blind Thomas At The Crime Scene.

Be advised: these selections aren't blues nor do they have anything in particular to do with each other aside from the fact that I thought they were interesting. The first is David Jacobs-Strain peforming solo on a twelve string. The song is Ocean or a Teardrop.

I'm going to throw different styles together this evening, starting with a solo acoustic number by Davy Knowles called Come Home.

The debate over Quebec's secular Charter of Values has been a heated one. The proposed Charter would restrict public servants from wearing conspicuous religious items such as burqas and niqabs, which many critics say infringes on the rights and freedoms of religious minorities in Quebec. Quebecers who support the Charter, in turn, have been accused of bigotry, especially by other Canadians, claiming that this is just another example of the racism that is supposedly so prevalent in that province, and the supposed ethnic nationalism of the Parti Quebecois.

This is Lucky Peterson with Noel Johnston on second guitar performing at a jazz festival in Vienna in 2009. The song is Dead Cat on the Line.

Tax-filing season, everybody's favourite time of year, is once again upon us in Canada. It's that time of year that we get to see just how much of our money our provincial and federal governments are taking to spend on seemingly wasteful things that nobody is supposed to care about. It's also the perfect time of year for the politicians to start talking louder than usual about cutting taxes and eliminating unnecessary spending.

I wanted to note the passing of Pete Seeger earlier this week, but I thought it called for more than just taking a few minutes in the midst of a busy week to score three clips of his performances and put them up. So I'd like to come back to it at a later date — though not too much later — with something a bit more substantial. For now, here's some blues starting with I Know by Frog & the Beeftones.

Ron Deibert, the cyber-security expert quoted in the CBC story I posted about last night, has an op-ed in today's Globe and Mail. It's all worth a read but he sums things up pretty nicely in this paragraph. In reference to the most recent revelations concerning CSEC's activities:

The revelations require an immediate response. They throw into sharp relief the obvious inadequacy of the existing "oversight" mechanism, which operates entirely within the security tent. They cast into doubt all government statements made about the limits of such programs. They raise the alarming prospect that Canada's intelligence agencies may be routinely obtaining data on Canadian citizens from private companies - which includes revealing personal data - on the basis of a unilateral and highly dubious definition of "metadata" (the information sent by cellphones and mobile devices describing their location, numbers called and so on) as somehow not being "communications." Such operations go well beyond invasions of privacy; the potential for the abuse of unchecked power contained here is practically limitless.

Yup. And I trust that the opposition parties will take every opportunity to climb all over the government on this. Right, Tom? Right, Justin?