Loopy left just can’t get it right

A letter in the July 5th issue of McLean’s magazine really shows the woolly-headedness of the left. Someone you have never heard of, named Irene Gammel, evidently some apparatchik of Ryerson University, that oh-so-politically correct bastion of all things multi-cult as long, well, as they aren’t Jews of course. Oh, and they aren’t particularly keen on white men either. They are okay with white women as long as they are lesbian man-haters. Stay at home Moms are as welcome as someone with diarrhoea at a hot tub party.

Anyway, apparently Gammel “co-edited” a bit of leftish nonsense entitled Anne’s World: A new Century of Anne of Green Gables.

Evidently, Gammel and author Helen Hoy, have re-created the story’s heroine as a child with fetal alcohol syndrome – itself a creation of the loony left – and mental illness. All evidently, to be about “diversity of cultures, identities and perspectives.” Ack! Gag me with a spoon.

Lucy Maud Montgomery created Anne as a fictional character to tell a story, a story of fiction. You remember fiction? As in made up.

But these card-carrying members of the loony left have to try and recreate a much-loved piece of Canadian fiction in their own woolly-headed image.

I am so tired of the left. The next time they are right on anything will be the first time.

I am, for the record, absolutely angry with BC Premier Gordon Campbell’s handling of the HST and the apparent way he deliberately obfuscated the issue during the spring campaign of 2009.

But, and this but is bigger than Libby Davies’, if Carole James, the leader of the BC NDP and Jim Sinclair, the head of the BC Federation of Labour, are against it, then clearly it must, by definition, be worthy of support.

And there’s the paradox.

Thousands have signed petitions in the campaign steered by the long past his ‘Best by’ date, Bill vanDerZalm, against the HST. Have they examined the nature and structure of the tax? I doubt it.

But one has to wonder how much of this is created by a visceral anti-tax reaction, something of which, I might add, I possess in abundance.

There have been a number of things done by the Campbell government that I haven’t liked, not the least being the way the HST was foisted upon us with nary a word of consideration with those who actually have to pay it. But then, I am still smarting over Campbell’s aquiesence to the BCGEU back in 2003 just when he had them on the ropes.

But there is no way in Hell I am prepared to return to the rule of those idealogical idiots who inhabit the NDP. Not a chance would I want to see BC return to the dark days of the 90’s. With the election of the NDP in 1991 until their demise, mired in scandal in 2001, those ego-centric, idealogical idiots, managed to take the BC economy from first to worst in the country. Even Newfoundland, the perennial weak sister of Confederation, had a better economic performance. That’s a monumental amount of incompetence.

Hands up anyone who wants to give the levers of power to the shrill and shallow Carole James. Not in this lifetime or the next I say.

Let’s not forget that James is propped up by Sinclair the other loud opponent of the HST. He’s the head of the BC Fed. The union funded organization that is against anything business and for anything that doesn’t involve that curse word “profit.”

Unions, in my opinion, have outlived their original purpose which was the protection of their members. And I say that as the son of a career union member and a former member of four different unions in my working life. They are nothing more than political operatives of the left and protectors of those who feel entitled but fail to recognize that effort should be the precursor to reward.

But more than that, they strip all their members of substantial amounts of money and give them exactly … what? Anyone who gives value to his or her employer could negotiate a good deal for themselves. Why? Because any employer will pay for value. Value is not paying some ample bottomed individual to take coffee money in a government cafeteria. Get a marketable skill that doesn’t involve a mop or a stool and chances are you will make a decent living without a union sucking money off your paycheque.

And, while I am on this rant, I am so tired of the rhetoric of the NDP and their union backers. They talk about a living wage. Life is not about having your hand out expecting something you have not earned. Well, unless you are a a paid-up member of the Liberal Party of Canada or the NDP and their collection of Chardonnay socialists.

Or, to quote the venerable Margaret Thatcher, “the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

In my father’s day, the unions existed to protect workers from exploitive employers. But in this day and age, there are laws in every jurisdiction to prevent employers from exploiting any employee. The employment standards in every province across this country must be adhered to by each and every employer. Never mind the various Human Rights tribunals that have moved from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Unions have evolved into members’ money-sucking political machines of the left. And nothing more, despite whatever protestations to the contrary you may be assaulted with from the likes of Jim Sinclair, Sid Ryan, Buzz Hargrove or the biggest blowhard of them all, Ken Georgetti, head of the Canadian Labour Congress. Evidently, they won’t be satisfied until they have achieved a universal level of mediocrity.

I was in the Calgary airport recently and watched several members of the Teamsters going into the Air Canada lounge. I guess traveling business class on members’ dues is de rigeur for the entitled of the left.

At any rate, these scions of the labour movement were wearing black t-shirts with their logo on the back arranged in biker style with a top rocker, logo and a bottom rocker. One had a baseball cap referring to himself as a thug. They looked like bikers but they weren’t, they were union executives. Or, more accurately, they looked like union executives being biker wannabes. But the message they were espousing was clear. They were tough. They were the Teamsters. They were to be feared.

These are the allies of the political left.

It doesn’t matter whether we are discussing that hopey-changey master of rhetoric inhabiting the White House, Carole James or the self-righteous “co-editor” of the ludicrous re-casting of Anne of Green Gables as an FAS suffering, psychotic, one-legged Nigerian lesbian bus driver, I am so tired of the protestations of the left.

Even if I have to suffer through the HST and another term of Gordon Campbell.

Leo Knight
primetimecrime@gmail.com