WHITEHORSE, YUKON - There is no scarcity of absurdities committed against ordinary people in the name of governance these days.

The latest to come to light was the muscle-flexing Calgary immigration officer who, evidently over-trained to spot terrorists, refused entry to two German teens heading for Whitehorse to participate in a student-exchange program.

Much of these type problems stem from enforcement sections of laws that include "in the opinion of" and "at the discretion of" an officer. The statute should also make provisions to garnishee an officer's wages to fully reimburse victims who are found to have suffered injustices and monetary losses due to discretionary abuses.

More good judges who speak of "justice" are in demand. A judge once ruled that a local deputy minister's exercise of discretion to enforce an environmental protection order was "unfair and contrary to natural justice, and his exercise of that discretion was, as the law calls it, an exercise of abuse of discretion." But did he pay? No. Did the victim pay? Extraordinarily so.

Aggravating bureaucrats think it's fair game to use wide-sweeping discretionary powers for the sake of making others miserable. When individuals return the favour, bureaucrats get huffy.

Maybe it's past time for the good people of this country to bring the government to heel. After all, whose government is it? Who's paying the freight? You are, the taxpayer. And the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, God bless him, is your sentry.

Shortly before the Oscars were handed out, the tuxedo-clad Walter Robinson was downstairs in the Parliament building hosting the annual Teddy awards ceremony that bestows dubious distinction on wasters of your hard-earned money.

The Best Western Comedy Since Blazing Saddles went to the extravagant and absent-minded Justice department for its $700 million boondoggle that lost track of 38,269 gun owners.

How does a government lose more than 38,000 anything without noticing?

Nobody knows, least of all the bureaucrats.

Besides issuing hundreds of duplicate certificates and licenses with wrong pictures, the Canadian Firearms Centre in Miramichi, New Brunswick, has registered non-existent firearms and licensed dead people.

The dead part is explainable. Complaints abound from applicants who have waited months--even years--to receive licenses and registration certificates.

The firearms centre is a gun registry. Its function is to register guns. A gun is a gun is a gun. There is no middle ground, unless, of course, there's a devil in the definition.

It is only reasonable to assume that a gun registry registering rapid-fire, projectile-shooting devices would require guns that fire metal objects to be registered. If not, the government is remiss for not immediately notifying all staple and other "gun" owners by mail not to bother applying to register such instruments.

Yet it came to light the registry is processing Black & Decker/Weller "non-restricted" heat and soldering guns. A registration card for said was forwarded without delay to Brian Buckley, a Manitoba autobody shop owner.

For the centre to register his shop tools, then call foul, proves the processors are woefully ignorant about the complex subject of firearms and cannot be trusted with a gun registry, much less a stapler.

According to a Canadian Press story in the March 21 "Star", the firearms centre spokesman groused that the "guns" weren't "firearms". Instead of taking the brunt for their goof and reprimanding or educating the employee, Buckley was threatened with a possible five years in the slammer for mischief.

It would seem fairer to praise him for being such an upstanding, conscientious citizen who undertook to obey what he interpreted to be the law about registering "guns"; or at least had a good chuckle over the incident and forget it.

Lack of humour will surely be the demise of the bureaucrat. And to start the process, at this very moment, countless master schemers are scrambling to plot clever ways to razz government officials to capture the coveted "gotcha" title, an honour currently held offshore.

A New Zealander, convinced that greens are loopy, sent an email to a Green member of Parliament who liked to make a name for herself by jumping on every environmental bandwagon moving.

The gentleman asked for support in a campaign he was spearheading to ban dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO), a colourless, odorless, tasteless chemical used in nuclear power stations, U.S. navy propulsion systems and many chemical industries. It also is present in pre-cancerous cells and prevalent in acid rain.

The fast reply from the MP's office wanted to know how she could be of assistance in such an important campaign. The red-faced politician quickly shuffled blame onto "temporary help" when word leaked out that the MP was supporting a ban on H2O, more commonly known as water.

"Loopy" brings us back across the big pond to Ottawa. "The Globe and Mail" revealed the Chretien government lost a $550,000 report.

A senile government that can lose over 38,000 gun owners and 16,000 illegal immigrants, and which could easily misplace 28,000 Yukon residents and conceivably lose similar numbers of medical patients and prison inmates, is too far gone to be trusted with three copies of an important report.

The Montreal-based advertising firm Groupaction Marketing Inc., which has cozy Liberal connections, didn't keep copies of a report it was contracted to produce to find ways to enhance the feds' visibility--a service many of us gladly provide for free.

The public officer who requested the report couldn't find it, despite Groupaction's claims to have delivered three copies, reported "The Globe" after going through Access to Information channels.

While Canada doesn't hold a monopoly on absurdities, many of the sappy stunts inflicted against the American cousins do have implications for Canadians, however.

Five U.S. federal officials and five Washington State biologists supposedly planted three separate fake samples of Canadian lynx hair on a rubbing post. At least one official was believed to have close ties with several green extremist groups who want every park and natioinal forest off-limits to the public.

A hint of lynx habitat would suffice to close roads into Washington's Wenatchee and Gifford Pinchot National Forests and outlaw off-road vehicles, activities like skiing and hiking, livestock grazing and tree-thinning for fire protection.

Two bogus samples were said to match a lynx living inside an animal preserve; the third matched to a truant pet held by federal officers until the owner could come get the big kitty.

Last summer, a handful of U.S. Fish & Wildlife officers withheld water rights from 1,500 parched Klamath Basin farms on the Oregon-California border to save a few non-endangered suckers and coho(Star, Aug 23/01).

Overbearing functionaries enforced the Endangered Species Act with armed U.S. marshals to prevent desperate farmers from cracking open the welded-shut valve to the flood gates. The arbitrary decision to deny water turned out based on nothing more than non-scientific hogwash. That's demonstrably criminal in anybody's books.

Canadians will soon have to learn the four-S principle: "shoot, swat, shovel and shut up". The proposed Species at Risk Act--patterned after the abominable U.S. Endangered Species Act--is ready for rubber-stamping in the parliamentary factory, although a green committee member was whining recently to CBC radio program "The House" that the act was gutted by amendments.

Thanks to previous experience with environmental law impossible to obey and outrageous fines impossible to pay, Canadians can look forward to ending up in similar straits as the Alaskan chap whose land was declared "valuable wetlands" and prohibited development. He received no compensation for his more than $100,000 U.S. loss. That's theft in anybody's books.

Under Species at Risk law, Canadian land owners can anticipate insane endangered-species zingers as occurred in California. Eight specimens of the ephemeral Delhi Sands fly were discovered/planted/ invented on a 100-acre tract of land.

A human outcry reached deafening pitch to protect the insect and its habitat. Caving in to pressure cost San Bernadino County an estimated $4.5 million U.S.

The fly was given a special preserve of "mating corridors" and interstate speed limit reduced to 15-miles-per-hour to cut down on windshield splatters during peak fly-mating season.

A hospital scheduled for construction had to be relocated. Land owners were forced to surrender sizable chunks of land and donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cause. That's extortion in anybody's books.

As evidenced, the government has spun out-of-control, passing new laws, establishing a multitude of new offices and sending forth swarms of regulatory bullies like so many black flies to harass good people and suck out their substance.

Thomas Jefferson had faith that whenever things stray so far out of whack as to attract people's notice, the well-informed could be trusted and relied on to set things straight.

Jefferson was never wrong and the good people of Alberta never disappoint. Maybe, just maybe, with Albertans in the lead, joined by other provinces, political pressure can be brought to bear on a federal government that needs to know who's really the boss.

Based on the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution of Canada, thousands of Albertans have rallied. Plans are in motion to go forth to ask the Klein provincial government to opt-out of the odious federal firearms laws.

After all, Alberta 's firearms culture is just as important as Quebec's claim to language.

As Link Byfield, publisher of "Report Newsmagazine", once wrote: "We have to stop pretending everything's basically okay. It isn't okay. It stinks. And until we sweep it clean, the stench will just go on getting worse."

Byfield suggested, "We need to so reform our political system that people once again are in charge...(and)stop worrying about whether what we say and do might hurt someone's feelings, and concern ourselves instead with honesty, prudence and justice."

Amen, bruthah Byfield.

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Copyright 2004 diArmani.com