To the Editor,
Re: Federal election.
With this election groaning along like an old rust bucket car, the mainstream media is getting desperate for a good old sensational headline.
So we are now entering the fiction stage of the campaign.
Fiction No. 1: the ‘famous’ NDP leader Jack Layton surge. Reality check: A study of the regional breakdown of the polls shows the NDP have actually received a small bump in Quebec.
However, in all the areas that really matter, they are getting badly beaten. In Ontario, for instance, they are getting close to becoming irrelevant, with just about 12 per cent support.
They aren’t much better off in B.C., where they are still way below their 2008 numbers. Ditto for Atlantic Canada.
Fiction No. 2: the Conservatives are the kings of personal attacks and slurs. Reality check: until now, we’ve had Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff constantly inferring Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t respect democracy, whilst forcing an election against the wishes of the voters.
His first major salvo in the slur stakes, though, was trying to put words in Harper’s mouth with a phony health-care statement he never made.
Now that the master of mudslingers Paul Martin, former Liberal leader and prime minister, has entered the fray. Remember his famous – or is that infamous? – statement that Harper is going to put soldiers on every street corner gem?
Now we have Martin’s favourite, ‘the hidden agenda.’
This time, following Iggy’s bit of deliberate deceit, the bogeyman really enters the fray in the form of a Martin-penned letter, warning of the ‘grave threat’ that a majority Conservative government will get rid of the Canada Health Act. Apart from the fact that politicians of any stripe are not in the habit of committing political suicide, they don’t have the power to do such a thing.
Watch out for more absurdities, well mixed with deliberate mistruths as the end gets closer.
Charles Reid
Nanaimo