Canadians are mild, well-mannered, tolerant and, well – nice. I should know – I am one.

Sometimes we are too nice: take the case of arch-twerp, Khaled Mouammar who described the Canadian immigration minister, Jason Kenney as a ‘professional whore who supports war’ because of Canada’s support of Israel. Khaled Mouammar is national president of the Canadian Arab Federation, an entity which receives Federal funding – in other words receives money from the average, nice, Canadian tax-payer.

I already have enough reasons for disliking paying tax without the nigglingly irritating knowledge that some of it is going to fund jihadist halfwits like Mouammar. I manage to reconcile myself to this outrage by realising that living is a compromise and so is democracy: the benefits outweigh the idiocy; grin and bear it. But when I see protestations like this coming from recipients – who, given half a chance, would cheerfully destroy the foundation that makes those dollars possible – of my democratically mandated beneficence, the irritation is in danger of metastasising into thoroughly un-Canadian intolerance.

OTTAWA – Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says the Canadian Arab Federation will have to change its leadership and adopt a more moderate stance or risk losing federal funding.

The federation reacted Friday by saying it is undemocratic and dangerous for a cabinet minister to “bully” an elected president and board of directors, and the minister’s comments should concern all immigrant-settlement agencies in Canada.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said a decision will be made soon on the funding threat he made after Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouammar described the minister as a ‘professional whore who supports war’ during the Israeli bombing of Gaza last month.

I’ve always wondered what use church meeting minutes were; no-one reads them, no-one is interested and they usually collect dust in an obscure part of the church secretary’s office.

But now, all that has changed. Alma Harding has shown us the way: they are a weapon to be wielded against unruly vandals.

Here we have yet another vivid demonstration of Mr. Bumble’s hypothesis by the aberrant British legal system, ever vigilant in its enduring quest to prosecute the innocent and exonerate the guilty:

Alma Harding was walking home after a church meeting when she saw three teenagers kicking a ball among the flower beds she had planted on the village green.

After months of petty vandalism in the area, it was the last straw for the arts and crafts teacher.

She called to the group, remonstrating with them, but was alarmed when they approached. One swore at her, calling her a ‘******* fatty’, magistrates heard.

In fear, the 63-year-old lashed out with the church minutes she was carrying, and caught one of the boys, a 13-year-old, on the cheek. She scurried home, upset, and that might have been the end of it.

But the boy and his mother went to police and yesterday Mrs Harding, who sings in the church choir, was convicted of battery.

If this happens again, in addition to swatting them Alma should sing at the malevolent louts.

The blurb on the back of David Copperfield’s Wasting Police Time says this:

Ever wondered why you can’t find a policeman when you need one? PC David Copperfield has the answer… they’re all inside the station, writing reports, photocopying, stapling and filing – when they’re not getting caught up in the petty squabbles of the underclass. Wasting Police Time is his hilarious and shocking diary of life as a modern British bobby. It’s the first book to spill the beans about the way senior police officers waste our money while fiddling the crime figures and scrambling to meet bogus Home Office targets. Copperfield’s chief constable won’t like it, and neither will the government. But honest taxpayers, sick of being fleeced while criminals rule our streets, will relish every word.

Well, the police in the UK have found something else to do to take their minds off the fact that they are not fighting crime: arrest those who do. Peter Drummond confronted a drug dealer, John Nellies and flushed his heroin down the toilet. What was his reward? Two months in the slammer.

Father-of-three jailed after confronting drug dealer who sold heroin to his family

Father-of-three Peter Drummond was so angry when he discovered someone had sold heroin to his family that he took matters into his own hands.

He confronted John Nellies in his home and flushed five of the drug dealer’s bags of heroin down the toilet.

But yesterday it was Drummond – not Nellies – who found himself being jailed in court.

The 26-year-old shook his head in disbelief as he was ordered to serve two months for breaching the peace by barging into Nellies’s home and threatening him.

In Les Miserable, the hero, Jean Valjean is imprisoned for five years for stealing bread while the policeman, Javert mercilessly pursues him after his release. While he was writing the novel Victor Hugo witnessed the fate of someone who stole a loaf of bread and this undoubtedly provided some of the inspiration for his great novel. Jean Valjean’s fate was harsher than Drummond’s, but considerably less bizarre.

Victor, if only you were alive today.

Ian Hunter: The erosion of marriage

A house built on sand cannot stand. It seems likely that Canadians are about to learn this sobering truth thanks to the polygamous citizens of Bountiful, B.C.

Bountiful residents belong to a breakaway Mormon sect that practises polygamy. Two Bountiful “bishops” – Winston Blackmore and James Oler — have been charged with polygamy contrary to Section 293 of the Criminal Code. The issue is whether Section 293 can survive a constitutional challenge under Canada’s Charter of Rights.

Marriage is the house built on sand. Once the Canadian Courts dictated that marriage no longer meant what it had meant for the 20 centuries of Christendom – namely, the union for life of a man and a woman — but could include same-sex unions, the foundation for marriage was eroded. If two men living together can be called a marriage, why not one man and three women? If two women can be married, why not the members of a commune? When you substitute a definition of marriage based not on reproductive potential but on ideology, then marriage means any arrangement with ideological acceptability.

Perhaps the time has come for the proponents of normal marriage to admit defeat and abandon the word “marriage” as one whose meaning has become so corrupted that they no are longer willing to have anything to do with it. Heterosexual monogamous commitment could have its own new word: hetmoniage, perhaps. Hideous, but at least it’s ugly enough that no-one would be likely to steal it as they have “marriage”.

I fear a linguistic contrivance is unlikely to help: the problem is too deep, too dire and too entrenched. As Ian Hunter reminds us:

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. In the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed. We laugh.

“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on those faces there is no smile.”