TORIES CONTINUE FOOD RIPOFF
Got one of those garbage letters from my MP.
You know the kind. Flunkies in a dungeon produce a Dick and Jane synopsis of the Tory party line and after it has been approved by the prime ministerial dictatorship, it is shipped to us for free.
Which would be OK if it wasn't just advertising that isn't as interesting as the latest Canadian Tire circular. Yet this is supposedly special communication with the taxpayers.
What's special is how misleading it is!
Now I don't know Bernard Trottier, the Conservative member for Etobicoke-Lakeshore. Which is a bit bizarre when you consider I have lived in the riding for the same 50 years when I wrote daily about politics at all level.
It gets really weird when you consider that I have been on a first-name basis with all the other politicians who have represented the area. Indeed, if I had decided not to become Editor of the Toronto Sun, I would have continued with the federal nomination and been elected Tory MP as Patrick Boyer was after I stayed in newspapers.
So I do read Trottier's campaign literature carefully to try to get a sense of who he is and what he stands for, that is if MPs are allowed to stand for anything these days that isn't dictated by the leaders.
Unfortunately, all I get is mass-produced BS that can be read on the kindergarten level.
The latest missive came with the headline "Do Canadians benefit from trade?"
The real answer, of course, is that the country does benefit, but the farmers, business and industry benefit most.
Let me give you just one example of how the Canadian consumer is at the bottom of the pile when the diplomats, bureaucrats and Prime Minister's Office decide to do a deal with any country or trading bloc.
Every six months or so, one of the Toronto newspapers will do a story on the latest sellout, when some trade pact with some lucrative region threatens to unravel because the negotiators of the Asia-Pacific Region or the EU say they won't deal with us as long as Ottawa gives such sweetheart deals to dairy, poultry, meat and grain producers that their own exporters are handicapped in competition.
You see the result daily if you travel in the U.S. If you don't believe me, shuffle off to Buffalo for a few hours in the stores and restaurants where you will find that everything from the wings to the bread to the roast chicken to a dozen eggs to a slab of cheddar to the beer cost less than the similar product in T.O.
I had a friend who won a National Newspaper Award for a series on this in the Toronto Star. Oh yes, it was several decades ago, but it could win the award again because nothing's changed, thanks to chickenshit trade bureaucrats and their bosses bowing to a lobby that is no longer important.
The MPs and MPPs continue to support the farmers of the country over the consumers. Getting the highest possible price for food is more important than providing food at a reasonable cost to families. Yet our food production is dominated not by the shrinking number of small farmers but by agribusiness millionaires and international corporations protected by huge subsidies and receiving special breaks on everything from their fuel to their taxes.
The feds continue to protect the food producer against the Canuck consumer. The government's anonymous foot soldier MPs continue to pump out this crap about how "our Conservative government is delivering on the most ambitious trade agenda in Canadian industry."
Great! This must mean the price of our food is about to go down instead of being kept artificially high. After all, a really good trade deal would see Canadians also benefitting from lower prices on everything from lamb to scallops as well as our economy being stimulated. But that's not about to happen!
The agriculture lobby lives in such a financial fairyland that we had the ludicrous argument years ago from the Quebec dairy farmers, who produce most of the industrial milk of the country, that of course they should be allowed to keep their special inflated milk price deals with the rest of Canada even if their province voted to separate. How nutty is that?
Unfortunately, with this federal election coming up on us like a runaway freight, voters like me who call themselves compassionate conservatives are stuck between the authoritarian Tories, the flighty gLiberals and the socialists who have never seen a union that they don't want to prop up.
Makes me yearn for an MP who isn't a tape recorder spewing out the latest PMO line.
...............
Gee, Trottier has just trotted out the party line in another new and curious letter. "How can we better protect our children?" is the theme.
Once again we get so little information that it would overflow from a thimble. It's all designed to get us to provide the Tories with enough personal contact information that their workers can use it to bombard us during the campaign.
Oh there's room for maybe a Twitter snapshot or two of our reaction to how they plan to keep keep our kids safe
Now I would really be interested in several pages on just what those plans are, but the purpose is to pretend to inform us, not to really do so. Actually my junk mail had more real facts than this skimpy appeal.
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