Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Underneath those Conservative Suits

I'd always rather imagined that, though I disagree with them, the members of the Conservative Party were mostly decent folk who simply saw things differently from how I saw them. Certainly they'd be jaded by politics just like the members of other parties, but I still imagined that they had a shred of humanity.

I see the same thing whether we're arguing the free market and capitalism or abortion in birth control. Except for rare occasions, they seem to be human beings.

But then you start to hear stories.

The Tory Agricultural Minister, Gerry Ritz, speaking in reference to the Listeriosis crisis, described it as a death of a thousand cuts “or should I say the death of a thousand cold cuts.”

Yes, those darn dead people, all 17 of them, are so inconvenient. Their deaths are getting in the way of the deregulation platform plank. If only they would remove themselves from the public eyesight, the Tories could get on with privatizing inspections of all sorts of foods so that rich people and corporations could get bigger tax cuts.

It's not important that those people are dying. It's not the tragedy of the situations, the horror of the families watching their loved ones die and their women miscarry. No, the real tragedy is the effect this is having on Gerry Ritz and the Tories.

As if to add insult to stupidity, or stupidity to insult, Gerry Ritz, upon hearing that there was a Listeriosis death in Prince Edward Island, added:
Please tell me it's Wayne Easter.

That would be the Liberal Agricultural critic, the guy who has been demanding answers about how and why the crisis happened and how the government would prevent such incidents in the future given that they are ploughing ahead with the deregulation of inspections.

Yeah, classy bunch.

You have to wonder if we're looking at a party of people who honestly believe that massive tax cuts for corporations will somehow benefit every Canadian's standard of life, or we're looking at people who are just a bunch of greedy, selfish bastards out to soak us for every last penny.

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