The National Post’s Don Martin dismisses the official government line on the Gay Pride/Diane Ablonczy/Brad Trost affair—i.e., that Ablonczy wasn’t “demoted” for funding the parade in Toronto, just reassigned due to unrelated events—as “barely plausible.” We have no idea what to believe about all this, frankly. But we certainly agree with Martin that it’s odd Trost’s comments have been allowed “to stand without comment” from the PMO, and disappointing that a capable minister like Ablonczy has yet again been left to twist in the wind.
Compounding our inability to know what to believe, The Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanski suggests Trost might have been “fully authorized to slag Ablonczy in public, in hope of appeasing … social conservatives” over funding Toronto’s Pride parade, or Ablonczy’s LGBT photo-op, or whatever it is they’re supposedly enraged about. The problem with that plan—and it’s a whopper, as Radwanski says—is that far more people know about it now than ever did before. Thanks to David Akin and an unidentified “little birdie,” they now also know that the government is positively lavishing gay and lesbian events from coast to coast with taxpayers’ cash. That doesn’t mean this wasn’t some kind of Machiavellian scheme, of course. Remember: these people are idiots. But if it was, it was certainly an epic failure.
In the Post, William Watson says between the Bank of Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute and “a large number of [other] private-sector economic forecasters,” there’s no real reason we should need Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page to critique the government’s economic forecasts. In theory, we could be convinced of this argument. But the whole point of establishing the PBO was to enhance government transparency, not Bank of Canada transparency or independent think-tank transparency. Procedural wrangling aside, it says here the all-party consensus against Page is proof positive that the transparency problem still exists, and still needs solving. The Toronto Star’s James Travers is, as one might expect, considerably more sympathetic to Page and his office. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really have anything novel to say about it.
In the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the Fraser Institute’s Niels Veldhuis and Amela Karabegovic warn the newly created Employment Insurance working group against radically increasing the system’s generosity, “the end result [of which] will be a significant and permanent increase in Canada’s unemployment rate.”
Briefly, and well worth reading: in Maclean’s, far and away the best thing Mark Steyn has ever written about the free speech/human rights commissions debate; Lawrence Martin, in the Globe, on Stephen Harper’s grandfather’s disappearance in 1950; and the Gazette’s editorialists blaming “military incompetence” for the death of a Snowbird pilot in 2007.
Bad, G8-related advice
The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui rather extraordinarily insists Stephen Harper must either “fall in line with Obama” on every significant issue of the day or publicly justify his deviation. Were we annexed by Washington in the dead of night? Why weren’t we told?
The Star’s Bob Hepburn, meanwhile, wants these G8 summits abandoned forever because they never accomplish anything. Instead, he wants much, much bigger meetings of world leaders, presumably because adding more people and disparate opinions to committees always leads to quicker and more important consensuses.
Duly noted
The Globe’s Marcus Gee reads the mid-garbage strike temperament of Torontonians much as we do: “it’s a pain, but we’ll live.” (Well, actually, for us apartment-dwellers it isn’t even a pain!) Not to say people aren’t suffering—daycare users and those robbed of their summer jobs in particular—but Gee believes mayor David Miller is winning this fight comfortably.
The Edmonton Journal’s Graham Thomson argues Ed Stelmach’s no-new-taxes-as-long-as-I’m-Premier proclamation, combined with his theatrical rescinding of a new liquor tax, may well be good short-term politics. But one of three unpleasant outcomes nevertheless lies at the end of his strategy: abandoning his pledge, cutting spending or racking up even bigger deficits. “Albertans are grown-ups; we understand the future is impossible to predict,” the Journal’s editorialists chime in, arguing he “could have mused about keeping options open and changed the subject” rather than tempting fate.
In appropriately decrying the media’s excessive obeisance to Michael Jackson, the Globe’s Margaret Wente twice gives the proverbial finger to his children, insisting there’s no possible way Jackson could have been their biological father. We would refer Ms. Wente to the case of the one-white one-black fraternal twins as evidence that the skin colour of children born from mixed-race couples is a bit of a genetic crapshoot, and not just like mixing paint.
National Post
chris.selley@gmail.com
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