The Left Wing Needs to Grow a Pair

Seriously.

I'm getting tired of this sort of nonsense. The Conservatives are now blaming the Liberals for the Listeria outbreak. That's right. They claim that deficiencies were known a year before the Conservatives came in to power, therefore it's the Liberals fault.

The Conservative leader insisted his government has already taken action by modernizing the inspection system

Give me a break. Why do the Liberals sit on this? The Conservatives, following their "government sucks at everything" philosophy, privatized food inspection.

And then 16 people fricking died.

Where are the Liberals? Where are the NDP? Where is anybody beating the Conservatives over the head with the fact that their philosophy kills people?

The Conservatives don't hesitate. They don't question for a moment whether or not they should lie, deceive, prevaricate and defecate on the Liberals. Anything for a moment of a surge in the polls.

And I realize what the problem is. The people leading the progressive and liberal political groups have no balls (or "Thatchers" for that matter).

Look at the U.S. presidential campaigns. Why isn't Barack Obama hitting McCain over the head with the fact that he's lying through his teeth and he can't remember how many houses he has? Wouldn't that spell "out of touch" even to the lower class base of the Republican party?

Look at Ontario when Mike Harris was using tax dollars to advertise insults on television agaisnt his own employees (teachers). What did the teacher's union do? Did they tear up his absolute lies about how much extra work he was making them do without pay? Did they tear in to his lies averaging private school funding in to the "cost of education"?

No. They produced terrible, stupid commercials where teachers appeared in front of the camera and were asked, "Did you know Mike Harris was once a teacher?". And the teachers would say, "No, I can't believe it."

Cowardice. Absolute, rank cowardice.

I want leaders on the left that show some spine. Somebody find me one and get these lying, warring, corporate-welfare Conservatives out of my damned government.

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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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Listeria: the Deregulating Policy of Death

I don't see why anyone should pussyfoot around this issue.

The Conservative policy for food inspections is deregulation and self-inspection. The Conservative policy is to save tax dollars and trust the free market to correct cheaters.

Of course, when cheating kills people and takes 70-90 days to detect, the free market is only going to correct the situation only after a lot of people have died.

So far, 13 people have died because of a deregulated meat inspection regime.

Why should anyone pussyfoot around this issue? This is Conservative philosophy failing us. This is the exact reason that we oppose the Conservative party - because their policies of deregulation are mortally dangerous to actual human beings.

It is not manipulating a tragedy to point out where the blame lies and make sure the same people don't get more opportunities. If we don't stop the Conservatives, especially if they get a majority, you can look for more and more death and destruction of their mindless policy of deregulation, self-policing and privatization. You can look for more people taking profit at the expense of Canadian citizens.

And don't let them wiggle out of it, like that Ottawa Citizen article today that tried to blame the contamination of Canadian made products, sold to Canadians, on globalization.

There is no wiggle room. Call these people on their nonsense and keep them out of government.

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Sponsorship vs Listeria

Every government has its scandals. When the Liberals first came to power (federally), they came in on a promise to scrap the GST. They promptly dropped this promise and things were quiet on the scandal front for some time.

Just before we switched to a Conservative government, there came the Sponsorship scandal. Of $250M that was supposed to be spent to improve the nation's image among Quebecers who might consider independence, some $100M is supposed to have been spent on "Liberal friendly ad firms" for doing very little work.

It was embezzlement or fraud, call it what you like.

Whatever it was, it was not an innate part of the Liberal platform. There is nothing implied by a liberal mentality that says, "We will support a culture of unaccountability that will allow embezzlement". This was a matter of corruption, not philosophy. Corruption is simply something that happens when people are in power for too long. Chretien was a master manipulator of elections and election timing. His party became corrupt when they began to feel invulnerable and entitled to their positions.

The point is that it wasn't a problem with the philosophy of the party. Most Canadians agree with the general philosophy of the party: balanced budgets; social services; social progress.

On the other hand we have the Listeria outbreak. If it turns out, as most of us suspect, that the outbreak was caused by the recently relaxed testing procedures for Listeria monocytogenes (which seems like a pretty reasonable assumption from which to start), then we have a problem of a completely different order.

The reason that the Conservative government cut inspections was because it is an innate part of the party's philosophy. What do the Conservatives believe in? Less government. More private enterprise. Private is better than public. Lower taxes. Less services. More military. Less social service.

While the Sponsorship scandal was a large embezzlement fiasco brought on by long developed corruption, the Listeria outbreak - if it is indeed the result of a lax inspection regime and not, say, terrorism or sabotage - is evidence that the core philosophy of the Conservative party is flawed. It would mean that the free market does not solve all ills and that low taxation is not in everyone's best interest.

Whenever I discuss this issue with free market favouring coworkers, they like to use the example of a gas station. If a gas station owner were to water down his gas he would lose business because people would find out and stop buying gas from him. This example fails miserably in real life. Yes, the free market works fine for restaurants and gas stations because a) we are all experts on whether our cars break down ten feet from a gas station or when restaurants skimp on portions and b) the time from cheating to being caught is very small. If I drive up to a gas station and see five cars broken down two car lengths from the pumps, I know something is wrong here.

Listeria doesn't work that way, though, does it? Neither does education or health care. You might not realize that your child has been given a bad education for twenty years. You might not realize that your private health care system is deeply flawed until you're dying of cancer and your insurance company uses every trick in the book to deny you coverage and let you die.

And Listeria? It has a 70 to 90 day incubation period. You're not going to see people dying from it for at least two months after it's been in the food system. Then you're going to see them dying for three months after that.

And after people have been dying for three months? Then the free market will kick in and punish the corporation and inspection regime that caused the problem.

Well. Hallelujah for the free market. It told us afterward what we needed to know in advance.

There will be people who tell us not to make political hay out of death. But this is a political issue. This is a political issue that cuts to the heart of each party's philosophy. Can we trust the free market to protect our health or not?

If the lax inspection regime allowed Listeria to kill these people, then we know the answer: it can't.

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