NDPers on council – in particular former councillor and world-champion trougher Howard Moscoe – pandered to Ms. Crowe and her friends, and the idea of banning panhandling in Toronto quickly fell by the wayside. Instead, the Millerites put in place a feel-good, politically correct five-million-dollar-a-year plan, for which an army of social workerswere hired to get to the root causes of problem panhandling and to try to cajole beggars off the streets. That plan exists to this day and now costs more than six-million dollars. Judging from the number of panhandlers on the streets of downtown Toronto and other points beyond the downtown core, the program has proven to be an exercise in futility – just as I expected it would be.
As I was to discover in the fall of 2013, the senior brass of TO2015 – the group engaged to organize the 2015 Pan Am Games – made an attempt to put in place their own peculiar brand of tolerance and inclusivity. It started in 2011, when former CEO Ian Troop (who was ousted in 2013 following my front-page exclusive on spending abuses by the entire TO2015 senior management team) announced with great fanfare that diversity would be adopted as a standard practice in the day-to-day business of the games. “All of our procedures and decision-making criteria will embrace diversity, from how we purchase goods and services to how we hire employees and recruit volunteers,” Troop said at the time. Lo and behold, when various would-be suppliers went online to register with the games’ database, they were required to declare whether theirs was a diverse business – meaning they had to report whether their business was 51 per cent owned and operated by women, visible minorities, Aboriginals, disabled people, or members of the LGBT population.
What in god’s name does diversity have to with the business of selling, say, hotdogs, T-shirts, stuffed animals, bobble-heads, and soccer balls? After I took up one man’s case (a white guy selling ribs), Pan Am officials, appropriately red-faced, relaxed their restrictions. But my goodness, what has Canada come to?
I have a number of theories on why political correctness – which most people claim to disdain – more often than not goes unchecked, but the media’s underreporting of it is at the top of the list. Many of my colleagues are clearly more interested in being part of the in-crowd than in sticking their necks out and appearing politically incorrect if there is a price to pay from the Lib-left for doing so, as there so often is. After all, everybody wants to be invited to the Christmas party. For years at City Hall, many in the media gave David Miller a free ride, more often than not treating him like he was above reproach. Why? Because he was the exact antithesis of his successor, Rob Ford, and for that reason alone he was able to dupe the masses. He presented perfectly: full head of blond hair, tall, good-looking, articulate, smooth, Harvard-educated, and quick on his feet. He could answer the most difficult questions and sound like he really knew what he was talking about or wasn’t avoiding the question altogether. It didn’t matter that he was a weak leader who was bone lazy and who rarely, if ever, in his seven years in office had the intestinal fortitude to make the really hard decisions that a mayor of a big and changing city needs to make. The packaging was perfect, so much so that he used his hair and his appearance in his 2003 and 2006 campaign ads. “Same Great Hair, Same Great Mayor,” read one of his campaign signs in 2006. I can only imagine what the reaction would have been if Jane Pitfield had used her good looks to sell herself in that same 2006 mayoralty race. But the lemmings who voted for Mr. Miller trusted him implicitly and without question. An attractive Harvard-educated leader would never lie, would he? He had to be good at what he did because, well, he looked good and went to a prestigious school. Because he presented well
As I was to discover in the fall of 2013, the senior brass of TO2015 – the group engaged to organize the 2015 Pan Am Games – made an attempt to put in place their own peculiar brand of tolerance and inclusivity. It started in 2011, when former CEO Ian Troop (who was ousted in 2013 following my front-page exclusive on spending abuses by the entire TO2015 senior management team) announced with great fanfare that diversity would be adopted as a standard practice in the day-to-day business of the games. “All of our procedures and decision-making criteria will embrace diversity, from how we purchase goods and services to how we hire employees and recruit volunteers,” Troop said at the time. Lo and behold, when various would-be suppliers went online to register with the games’ database, they were required to declare whether theirs was a diverse business – meaning they had to report whether their business was 51 per cent owned and operated by women, visible minorities, Aboriginals, disabled people, or members of the LGBT population.
What in god’s name does diversity have to with the business of selling, say, hotdogs, T-shirts, stuffed animals, bobble-heads, and soccer balls? After I took up one man’s case (a white guy selling ribs), Pan Am officials, appropriately red-faced, relaxed their restrictions. But my goodness, what has Canada come to?
I have a number of theories on why political correctness – which most people claim to disdain – more often than not goes unchecked, but the media’s underreporting of it is at the top of the list. Many of my colleagues are clearly more interested in being part of the in-crowd than in sticking their necks out and appearing politically incorrect if there is a price to pay from the Lib-left for doing so, as there so often is. After all, everybody wants to be invited to the Christmas party. For years at City Hall, many in the media gave David Miller a free ride, more often than not treating him like he was above reproach. Why? Because he was the exact antithesis of his successor, Rob Ford, and for that reason alone he was able to dupe the masses. He presented perfectly: full head of blond hair, tall, good-looking, articulate, smooth, Harvard-educated, and quick on his feet. He could answer the most difficult questions and sound like he really knew what he was talking about or wasn’t avoiding the question altogether. It didn’t matter that he was a weak leader who was bone lazy and who rarely, if ever, in his seven years in office had the intestinal fortitude to make the really hard decisions that a mayor of a big and changing city needs to make. The packaging was perfect, so much so that he used his hair and his appearance in his 2003 and 2006 campaign ads. “Same Great Hair, Same Great Mayor,” read one of his campaign signs in 2006. I can only imagine what the reaction would have been if Jane Pitfield had used her good looks to sell herself in that same 2006 mayoralty race. But the lemmings who voted for Mr. Miller trusted him implicitly and without question. An attractive Harvard-educated leader would never lie, would he? He had to be good at what he did because, well, he looked good and went to a prestigious school. Because he presented well
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