Slow News Day at the Globe and Mail

I am no fan of the Globe and Mail for reasons too long to list in this posting. For those loyal to the self proclaimed "national newspaper", my comments on two of the columns in recent editions (the property manager for our building is kind enough to provide copies to its tenants) are not meant to be definitive of the level of journalism, only instructive.

Perhaps it was a slow summer day in the corridors of power but both Lysiane Gagnon (today) and Jeffrey Simpson (Saturday) had particularly fluffy excuses for commentaries befitting the esteemed positions they enjoy amongst the popular liberal intelligentsia.

Gagnon devoted an entire column to why an avowed BQ supporter friend of hers was turned off by Stephen Harper's answers or non-answers to one of those vapid surveys. You know the one - what is your favourite food, author, city, drink - as though any intelligent voter would allow the answers to dictate how she cast her vote. It seems the flippant answer Harper gave to the question, what is your favourite drink - grape juice - particularly incensed Ms. Gagnon's imbiber friend. Harper just didn't stack up to campari sipping Jack Layton.

After all this verbiage, delivered with no sense of irony, Gagnon concludes: "Stephen Harper didn't lose my friend's vote because of this. She's been voting routinely for the Bloc Québécois in all federal elections since 1993. But the way Mr. Harper handled the quiz put her off completely. She will never take a second look at what he might offer in terms of policies."

Would anyone so shallow know a policy if she saw one?

As for the cerebral Mr. Simpson, he could come up with nothing better for his Saturday column than a comedic attempt better suited for amateur hour in a church basement in St. Brieux, Saskatchewan
(I have starred in one, so I speak from painful experience).

You know the schtick. Uncle Fred from Gabriola calls nephew Jeff in Toronto the Great and chortles his grand idea for Ralph Klein and Alberta to buy BC so Ralph could golf all year round. Believe me it doesn't get any better, guns, grizzlies, stetson hats, lotus-eaters, he hardly omits any Western Canadian negative stereotype sure to get a laugh from his urbane Toronto readers.

Reading this makes one think Jeffrey must have been hunkered down with his Golden Sayings of Epictetus before he penned this risible effort. "Laughter should not be much, nor frequent, nor unrestrained" perfectly describes the reaction most Albertans and British Columbians would have to Simpson's column. Well perhaps not the arrivistes to Eastern culture,Ujjal Dosanjh and David Emerson as they try on their new trained seal suits and practice the subtle deferential tilt of the head expected of us westerners once on the hallowed grounds of Outaouais.

Simpson would have served his metier and his readership much better had he rather reflected on a more serious question posed by the first century Greek stoic: “The question at stake”, said Epictetus is no common one; it is this: “Are we in our senses, or are we not?”