Underdog (21 page)

If I was handed a loonie for every time the word
heartless
was used about me, I'd be a multi-millionaire by now. Why? Is it because I actually want precious government resources to go to the programs and people for which they are intended instead of being used to feather the nests of bureaucrats and politicians or put toward building political fiefdoms within governments and agencies? Or because I supported conservatives like Rob Ford, who wouldn't throw money at any special interest group with their hand out or a tall tale to tell? Or because those conservatives have had the cojones to say no to the unions and special interest groups that are slowly but surely crippling to the point of bankruptcy Toronto's and Ontario's economies? More often than not, the lack of resources for basic services is not due to lack of funds. Instead, the funds that come in to governments are squandered before
they get to the front lines. If people stopped to think beyond the vitriolic hyperbole and the stereotyping of conservatives, they'd realize that during the regime of one premier (Dalton McGuinty) and deputy premier (Mr. Smitherman), Ontario was turned from a have into a have-not province, forcing it to beg for handouts from its federal counterparts. Ontario's debt doubled from $139 billion to $273 billion over the ten years Mr. McGuinty was in power, and tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs left the province for locations with less oppressive tax regimes. Because Premier McGuinty and his at first unelected successor, Ms. Wynne, were incapable of reining in spending, Moody's, a major global credit rating agency, downgraded Ontario's credit rating in mid-2012. It was downgraded again by the New York–based Fitch Ratings from AA to AA – in December of 2014 out of concern for Ontario's $12.5-billion deficit and the weak prospects of the province to balance its books by 2017–18 as finance minister Charles Sousa has ridiculously promised (a target he will never, ever meet.) To use Ms. Wynne's own words, there were indeed certain sectors of the economy that did “grow and prosper” under the NDP leadership at City Hall and under Premier Dalton McGuinty: public servants and employees belonging to powerful unions, like the firefighters, police, and teachers of Ontario. The very politicians who constantly scream “equality” have made it quite clear to the residents of Ontario that some are “more equal” than others. Tough love, it appears, need not be applied to those union members – teachers, firefighters, police, and other members of the labour movement – who will continue to prop up these politicians.

When Kathleen Wynne took over from Mr. McGuinty, she and her BFF in cabinet, the highly incompetent health
minister Deb Matthews – desperate to offset the money wasted on all the Liberal scandals and pricey union deals – set about cutting services to vulnerable seniors and kids, the very two groups who were supposed to be at the top of the Liberal priority list. Never mind compassion. These were desperate times, folks. The number of diabetes strips covered under OHIP – the strips being a surefire, inexpensive way for non-insulin–dependent diabetics to monitor their blood sugar to prevent escalation of their disease – was quietly reduced in the early summer of 2013. After all, the money must come from somewhere.

In 2010, the self-proclaimed movers and shakers in the media and a long list of political hacks and has-beens all jumped into the fray to try to get their man George Smitherman into the Toronto mayor's office. It was war. The Liberal machine worked overtime with smear tactics, endorsements from any politician, no matter how long they'd been out of the spotlight, and a string of polls that were so far off in their predictions, it all became quite laughable. The Lib-leftists were so busy patting each other on the back and convincing themselves that they were the only ones with the heart to do what was right for Toronto, they grossly underestimated the groundswell of resistance from Toronto residents who saw through all of this. In 2010, for the first time in a long time, voters realized that the only real thing the Lib-left cared about, other than their own entitlements, was winning. In October, a silent majority came out of the closet and voted for Rob Ford. If the smear tactics and the obsessive bullying during the campaign and throughout Rob Ford's entire four-year term has been any proof, the Lib-left really has no heart.

If the Lib-left had an official mouthpiece, it would most definitely be the
Toronto Star.
After I'd left City Hall for Queen's Park in June 2013, I was able to watch the Rob Ford saga more from the sidelines instead of being caught up in the middle of the chaos. Believe me, the City Hall reporters at the
Toronto Star
deserve credit for their doggedness and for unmasking Rob Ford's addictions and nefarious links with the crime world – although frankly, if the crack video had fallen into our laps and the
Toronto Sun
had the same resources to put toward shadowing Rob Ford as they did, I can guarantee we would have had the story – no, stories – far sooner. Still, the so-called “people's paper” – the paper that brags about protecting the downtrodden – wasn't content to rest on the laurels it secured for revealing the mayor's addiction to alcohol and use of crack cocaine. I watched as a long list of columnists lost all sense of decorum, professionalism, and class by repeatedly kicking the dog when he was down – calling him every nasty name in the book, from monster and cockroach to vulgarian, homophobe, racist, misogynist, and on and on. If I'd ever, ever used even one tenth of those names for David Miller or George Smitherman, I would have been hung out to dry by my media colleagues. I wondered how many of these reporters and columnists could truly look in the mirror and claim not to have baggage of their own, including addictions to drugs or alcohol. But they never let up on the feeding frenzy. I saw formerly well-respected members of my profession sink to an unfathomable new low.

The Lib-left are good at using people for their own ends, but they rarely give credit where it is due. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this was when controversial
pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel agitators John Greyson and Tarek Loubani found themselves in prison in Egypt for fifty days in 2013. It was Conservative foreign affairs minister John Baird who was instrumental in getting them out of prison – even though it was an uphill battle for him, considering the two changed their story more than once about why they ended up in the midst of a highly charged protest in Cairo's Ramses Square in mid-August of that year. On the October 2013 day they were freed, those close to Mr. Baird recall that while on holidays in Boston and Provincetown, the foreign affairs minister was “all over” the issue with his deputies and Canada's ambassador to Egypt. He also ensured Egypt's ambassador to Canada was in on the discussions. Before the day the prisoners were released, Mr. Baird reportedly gave up other arrangements to attend a dinner of the foreign ministers of the Gulf States to lobby the Egyptian minister.

Mr. Baird and his Conservative colleagues engaged in quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy to secure the two agitators' release. The left-wing media would have you believe that it was the photo opportunities of celebrities like Sarah Polley, Naomi Klein, Michael Ondaatje, Stephen Lewis, and Atom Egoyan that got them out of prison. In a May 2014 article in
Toronto Life,
Mr. Greyson, painted as the hero despite his outrageous anti-Israel rhetoric and his suspected ties to Hamas, didn't have the class to acknowledge the work of the Conservative government to secure his release from an extremely dangerous situation that could have ended in his death.

There's no doubt this was because it wasn't his leftist pals and assorted Israel haters who saved his skinny butt, but a Conservative government – and one that is pro-Israel, yet. How to rationalize that? I can only imagine what would
have happened if Mr. Greyson's captors had learned he is gay. He would have been condemned to death after a two-minute trial, as hundreds have been in Egypt.

The Lib-left not only does a remarkable job of reinventing history and deluding themselves into thinking they have a copyright on compassion, I've also discovered through much of my work championing the rights of the underdog that they really don't much care about the downtrodden at all – except to use them to prop up their political and funding fortunes, or for shameless photo opportunities. That quickly became apparent to me in 2002, when I spent six weeks studying the amount of money that had been poured into the homelessness file since Mel Lastman had become mayor and Jack Layton had anointed himself patron saint of the homeless. Mr. Lastman, of course, had been embarrassed during the 1997 mayoralty campaign by his comment that there were no homeless people in North York – a day before a woman was found dead behind a north Toronto gas station. Mr. Layton, never one to miss an opportunity to prop up his pet agendas, capitalized on Mr. Lastman's guilt by urging council to vote to declare homelessness a national disaster in October 1998 – as 450 of Mr. Layton's noisy friends, assorted homelessness activists, and ten TV cameras looked on. It was theatre of the absurd at its finest. The motion meant nothing. All it did was set up the homeless, who were trotted out for the cameras, to think payday (more shelter beds and more affordable housing) was around the corner. Still, that declaration, together with Liberal Anne Golden's three-hundred-page, six-hundred-thousand-dollar tome – representing a year's worth of study of the downtrodden at Mr. Lastman's request – did open up the municipal-funding floodgates.
The file was ripe for abuse and it was abused – turning homelessness into a growth industry at City Hall. The number of city staff, particularly managers assigned to homelessness, grew every year. The poverty pimps swooped in for their piece of the pie. And as is predictable, very little of that funding ever reached the homeless, in particular those wanting desperately to break the cycle of dependence.

There are many poverty pimps in Toronto masquerading as activists. I was convinced that these so-called activists never wanted to cure homelessness. Make no mistake: if they did, they'd find themselves out of a job or without a political agenda. No group was more notorious for shameless grandstanding and for using the poor for often violent and dodgy photo opportunities than the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and its leader John Clarke. Mr. Clarke, formerly from London, England, and who became a factory worker when he immigrated to Canada in the 1980s, founded OCAP in 1989 after joining the ranks of the unemployed. Professional protesting has since become his full-time job and Mr. Clarke takes it very seriously. After earning their notoriety for engaging in an extremely violent protest on the lawn of Queen's Park in 2000, the OCAP leader and his hangers-on – many seemingly suffering from mental issues – would disrupt business at City Hall repeatedly to make some point or other, mostly related to getting more money for the homelessness agenda. They were loud and threatening, and more often than not their protests would be accompanied by a strong police presence. They thrived on being escorted out of City Hall by security or, in the worst cases, dragged off in handcuffs. It was all a sideshow for them. Whatever point they were trying to make – and I'm not sure they had
any goal other than getting their faces on the six o'clock news – got lost in the hysteria surrounding their protest. The protesters – and certainly not the plight of the homeless and disenfranchised – became the news. During her years at City Hall, failed mayoralty candidate and professional public teat-sucker Olivia Chow regularly used OCAP to prop up her agenda. Ms. Chow showed up to the 2000 Queen's Park protest on her bike and tried to direct Toronto police to back off from arresting the OCAP protesters. Problem was, as a city councillor and a member of the Police Services Board at the time, she was not within her rights to do that. Shortly afterward, she was forced to resign from the Police Services Board over her gross error in judgment. Ms. Chow also sponsored a media event at City Hall in 2005 during which the poverty pimps made it clear they were encouraging welfare recipients to exploit a loophole that would allow them to collect an extra $250 per month in special diet benefits, whether they were eligible for the benefits or not.

Street health nurse Cathy Crowe, head of the now defunct Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC), was another one who created a career for herself on the backs of the homeless. In she would swoop to the city's homelessness advisory committee meetings like a queen bee, declaring to all who would listen that four billion dollars should be provided annually by the federal government and the provinces to build affordable housing and to fund other supports for the homeless. Ms. Crowe and her friends, propped up by
Toronto Star
coverage and by federal funding from the Liberal government of the day, showed their true colours very quickly; they had absolutely no interest in getting their homeless pawns off the streets. They vehemently opposed a homeless street count
in 2006, no doubt because the count would, and did, end up confirming that there are far fewer hard-core homeless people living on the streets of Toronto than they'd ever admit. When in the spring of 2006 homeless committee chairman Jane Pitfield dared propose a quality of life bylaw – similar to that operating in many cities across Canada – to ban pesky panhandling in Toronto, Ms. Crowe and her homelessness industry pals went berserk. They ranted, raved, heckled, and tried to bully Ms. Pitfield, a right-of-centre councillor, into resigning as chair for daring to show leadership in tackling a controversial problem. Ms. Pitfield never did step down, and eventually Ms. Crowe decided to boycott the committee, hoping Mayor David Miller and the rest of council would back her. That didn't happen. But I will always remember that sideshow in 2006 for what it said about the poverty activists. Their activism appeared to have less to do with compassion than about keeping themselves employed and in the spotlight.

This truth was reinforced big time when Ms. Crowe won the
Toronto Star
–operated Atkinson Charitable Foundation's Economic Justice Award of one hundred thousand dollars per year for five and a half years to further her work on the homelessness cause. I'm not sure what she did with the award money. I do know that she produced a book,
Dying for a Home,
which Ms. Crowe says went into a second printing quite quickly and “was received well.” She says that she shared the royalties she received with those featured in the book. She certainly didn't help the TDRC stay afloat in 2012, when it was forced to shut its doors due to financial problems. In both 2010 and 2011, Ms. Crowe ran for the NDP, vying for the provincial seat in Toronto Centre – Rosedale, but she did not win.
In the fall of 2013, Crowe landed a plum two-year position at Ryerson University as Distinguished Visiting Practitioner in the Department of Politics and Public Administration – to work, as she put it, on issues related to social justice. Her work included helping to set up a summer program called the Jack Layton School for Social Activists.