Globe Tag Team Slams Layton

Now I suppose it should come as no surprise that the right wing crowd at Toronto's national newspaper would come out swinging at the more inflammatory rhetoric being peddled by Jack Layton.

An awful lot of column inches have been dedicated to attacking Jack for his blaming of homeless deaths on Paul Martin. In fact, I'd venture to guess more has been written about Layton's comments than there has been coverage of the NDP's actual platform.

Yet it is a little puzzling that the right of centre columnists at the Globe and Mail would take close to a week to put a few sentences together. Perhaps it took them that long to stop sputtering in outrageous indignation, because that tone certainly inflects their columns.

The first up is Margaret Wente, a former Iraq invasion cheerleader (amazing how quiet she's been on that topic recently). Never one to shy away from using inflammatory rhetoric herself, Wente had this to say about some material she lifted from the Toronto Star (click here for the full article):

Who were the people so cruelly expelled from their rat-infested, makeshift shelter? And what will become of them now?

One was Luke O'Hearn, an able-bodied 20-year-old from Saint John. He lived under the bridge with his dog, Shok. Luke's girlfriend, who also lived there, comes from Markham. They met last winter while living in a junkyard in British Columbia.

"It's been a choice to live here because there's a certain freedom," Mr. O'Hearn told a reporter from the Toronto Star. "Here we don't have to pay any rent. We're not obliged to anyone but ourselves."

Now, I am a person of average compassion. I'd never argue that homeless people are homeless by choice. But clearly, some of them are. We used to call these people bums and vagrants, before those words were banned. Now every bum and vagrant is a homeless person, with an automatic claim on the public's sympathies and purse.

This is a very typical tack those on the right take. They track down those of the homeless who express a desire for “freedom” and assume this means being homeless is their choice. Wente goes on to list the “benefits” the homeless receive at taxpayer expense, throwing in shots about the waste of employing social workers, and the fact that two “able-bodied” young people should have no impediments to hard labour.

Wente's latter assumption, that simply having a fully functioning body can somehow get you a job conveniently ignores a whole host of requirements. In fact, most people need a home address, a home phone number, proper attire, and something of an education to get even the lowliest of paid labour. If a functioning body was the only requirement, then we could have chimps doing everything (and now that I mention it a chimp hammering away at a keyboard would likely be an improvement over Wente's attempts at logic).

The second member of this dynamic duo is Jeffrey Simpson, who's focus on Layton also begins with the homeless swipe at Martin. Simpson then proceeds to accuse Layton of living in the land where money grows on trees (click here for the full article):

The NDP platform is a joke, not because it's radical -- new ideas such as those for making Canada greener are welcome -- but because it doesn't add up. Does anybody care? Likely not, because the party won't form the government. But the document does indicate how far left Mr. Layton has taken the party.

The platform relies on a mixture of bad ideas and fairy tales, wildly overestimating revenues and underestimating spending. More than $8-billion is supposed to come from uncollected money identified by the Auditor-General. There's a good reason why that money hasn't been collected, and it isn't from lack of trying. The inheritance tax on which Mr. Layton relies is an old chestnut that has been tried and failed everywhere, even in the U.S. where armies of tax accountants and lawyers guide clients around the tax.

Again we have the right's tired refrain extolling the evils of tax and spend government with accusations that there could never be enough tax revenue to pay the bills. Simpson of course fails to mention that of the major parties' revenue surplus predictions, the NDP comes out in the middle, well below the *gasp* Conservatives. He also conveniently forgets to mention the NDP have pledged to maintain a balanced budget.

What I find interesting about these two right-wing columnists, especially in comparison to some of their other columns on the other political parties, is their focus on proposed NDP policy. You see the NDP have one. They've declared where they want to spend Canadians' money and how. They've been clear about how they'll raise the taxes they need to pay for it, and if they're wrong about the money they get, they've said they'll maintain a balanced budget.

At least the NDP have been open enough to provide a breakdown of their spending, and aren't nearly as pie in the sky as the so-called Conservatives (a rather ironic appellation given their economic prognostications).

Under the big C's and Harper we'll see gigantic tax cuts, which will be paid for by a similarly gigantic tax surplus. Of course discussing just how much of that cutting will be limited to taxes, as opposed to social programs, is something Harper is quite acrobatic at avoiding.

Then again, I don't really expect a lot in terms of insightful commentary from columnists of Wente and Simpson's calibur. They seem happy trotting out the same old cliches and overblown rhetoric about left leaning policies. Besides, it's easy to get out the cookie cutters, and pound out a reactionary column chock full of right wing chestnuts. Comparing policies of the various parties, and providing some original meaty commentary, might actually take some real work.

Naw, it's easier to get the bills paid blaming the homeless and screaming about taxes.