Christie Blatchford hits new low with joke piece about alleged evil 'political correctness' that apparently happened somewhere

Oh the humanity!

In case you missed it, that always reliable journalist Christie Blatchford wrote a piece in the National Post yesterday that purports to show the just how evil and egregious the forces of political correctness and liberalism have become in schools.


It seems, according to Blatchford's article, "A teacher at a posh private school in British Columbia was fired last month after making an innocuous comment about abortion to his Grade 12 law class."

Supposedly this all happened after he said during a class as an example:

“I find abortion to be wrong,” he said, as another illustration of this gap, “but the law is often different from our personal opinions.”
That was it, the teacher said. “It was just a quick exemplar, nothing more. And we moved on.”

But far from "moving on" apparently an unidentified female student said she was "triggered" by his comments and this led to a serious of terrible and nefarious doings by school administrators that resulted in the poor fellow being railroaded and tossed out of a job.

"“Such is the cost of a small misstep in a crushingly politically correct world,” he said sorrowfully."

Awful.

According to Blatchford:

What happened to the teacher over the ensuing few days sounds like something out of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, where people were subjected to what were known as ideological struggle sessions, forced to “confess” to various imagined sins before large crowds, and roundly denounced.

That is pretty amazing hyperbole.

If you really want to find out what allegedly happened next, you can, of course read the article.

But you might also first want to ask, what school?

Or, what teacher?

Or, what student?

Because nowhere, at any point, anywhere in this article are any of them identified.

The title really should have been "Unidentified teacher allegedly fired from unidentified school after unverified alleged accusations from an unidentified student".

While the use of anonymous sources (and the source here apparently requested anonymity) in journalism is a time honoured tradition important to democracy, the revelations that flow from this are normally aimed at known and named institutions or public figures in power.

Watergate may have come from the (at the time) anonymous "Deep Throat" but everyone knew what and who it was about.

Here it is not just the 'source' that is anonymous but the supposed instigating student as well as the school. This, of course, allows Blatchford to give only one side of the story, entirely as related by the 'source', without having to either seek comment from the school or student (and she makes no indication at all that she tried) or having to face any consequences if his version of what happened turns out to be balderdash for all anyone knows.

Blatchford then blows this alleged incident up as some kind of outrageous example of creeping totalitarianism that has broader implications. This despite the facts listed above and that she herself admits in the first paragraph that this is also a "posh" private school that can, therefore, set whatever rules it wants (even if the story the man tells is accurate, which we have zero way of knowing) meaning it would really only be an indication of what happens at this school. And what happens at this school is presumably what the well-to-do parents dishing out the alleged $30,000 a year tuition to send their kids there want.

It has no implications at all, even if true -- and really who can say given the lack of any actually identified 'perpetrators' -- for any school anywhere else at all.

But again, we have no way of discerning if anything here is real unless at least the school is given a chance to respond. Or the student if they want to allow themselves to be identified.

And conveniently the whole alleged story can be told with far fewer legal implications by telling it this way.

Neat trick that.

Here is the thing, if the source is anonymous and you won't name the school or seek to get their side and the student's side of the story you are publishing his account and opinion of what allegedly happened and not a news story. Blatchford has written a piece where there is no accountability at all for the accusations he is allegedly making against some alleged school with an alleged student who all allegedly did what he claims they did.

None.

Zero.

This is not journalism and this piece should never have been run.

But while not very journalistic, I suppose it is clever when your "article" has a pretty overt agenda.

And a very reactionary one at that.

Editor's Note: Subsequent to the publication of this piece, Blatchford released a second piece that does identify the school and attempt to corroborate the allegations made in her first piece, though now with a somewhat different angle. You can read all the details in  Posh Vancouver school places staff under gag order after teacher fired

What victories? -- Why the NDP's right is wrong...and DiNovo has a point!

As the NDP leadership race begins what appears will be a very long campaign to pick a leader there is, to date, only one candidate for the job -- Ontario leftist MPP Cheri DiNovo.

DiNovo somewhat inauspiciously started her run by announcing herself as an "unofficial" candidate in an apparent (and totally laudable) protest against the NDP's $30,000 entry fee but has since made her campaign official. While I think it is fair to say that the strategy used here is somewhat questionable from a tactical point-of-view (her initial "unofficial" launch got dramatically more press coverage than did her later official one, for example) DiNovo in both her official and unofficial launches spoke of the need for the party to embrace a "democratic socialist" platform and and to take strong stands against systemic injustices as well as for much broader initiatives than it is at present, such as fighting for free post-secondary education.

In doing so she has framed her campaign in terms analogous to those of the very successful campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

While, of course, whether or not she can accomplish a similarly unexpected set of results within the deeply undemocratic structures of the NDP remains to be seen, there is little doubt that radicalism and socialist ideas seem to be mounting something of a comeback in Europe, the UK and the US.

Though you would hardly guess it from much of the reaction to DiNovo's launch from both inside and outside the NDP.

Jen Gerson in a meandering and often borderline incoherent rant against principles in The National Post, ended by saying "In short, DiNovo is too principled to run a federal party. But perhaps that is a perfect fit for a party that is striving to be too principled to run a country."

While this type of cynical "concern-trolling" from the mainstream press decrying any hint of radicalism from the NDP as inherently consigning the party to electoral oblivion is nothing new and, as I have written of in the past, has a very real ideological objective, the question also remains, if this is true about leftist principles, why would Gerson care enough to write about it? That might be because there is no better way to crush any infant radicalism before it has an opportunity to prove this wrong and to attract electoral support than to do so while it is in its cradle!

But Gerson's premise that a socialistic program and tone would be disastrous for the NDP is one that is widely shared in the party's establishment and membership itself and we have seen this not simply from the dramatic shifts to the centre by the party's federal and provincial wings, but also in such moments as Pat Martin's notorious "rusty anchor" analogy, the dropping of the word socialism from the party's preamble, the bizarre narratives that emerged in the wake of Mulcair's unexpected ouster, and in the reaction to DiNovo's announcements on various social media platforms from the usual NDP suspects.

While all these commentators -- right, liberal or centrist NDP -- take this assumption as a given and an article of faith, it is really little more than that. For, so far, there is very, very little electoral evidence to back it up.

Simply put, if centrism and abandoning "ideological purity" and socialism are the key to winning, where are all the victories?

The NDP has not had much of a winning run in the era of its great shift to "realism".

They have lost elections they should have won in British Columbia, floundered rather badly in Ontario and even worse in New Brunswick and have been unable to win again in what many see as the party's historic heartland Saskatchewan.

While Darrell Dexter did triumph in Nova Scotia in 2009, his government achieved little of any lasting importance, went down to a crushing defeat in 2013, and the party's new leader Gary Burrill, represents a marked shift back to the left.

After a generation in power in Manitoba (where Third Way governance succeeded in delivering power -- if precious little social change - under specific circumstances to which we will return) the NDP was swept out of office this year.

The NDP did, of course, win a completely unexpected historic victory in Alberta, though it did so on what is by today's standards an at least nominally left platform in tone (with calls for a $15/hr. minimum wage and taxing the wealthy, etc) under conditions of a divided right, a basically historically unimportant Liberal Party (as we will see a very important point) and generational fatigue with a Progressive Conservative Party that had simply been in power for far too long.

Those who insist that the Third Way strategy will bring success point, needless-to-say, to the federal party "winning" the role of federal opposition for the first time in its history under Layton, who despite his reputation for being on the left actually pushed the party further and further to the center in every election he was leader.

What they fail to recognizance is that this happened in a "perfect storm" context where the Liberals had their worst and ultimately least popular leader in their history and the NDP had its most charismatic. The result was personality driven and when the personalities changed, as they did in 2015, the result was ultimately catastrophic for the NDP.

Never mind that the party "won" opposition in the context of the majority election of the most right wing government in modern Canadian history leaving the NDP with far less actual political clout and power in its four years in the role than it had had in the minority Liberal and Conservative parliaments that had proceeded it.

For a strategy meant to assure victory and power, this one seems to leave quite a bit to be desired.

Third Way progressive politics emerged in the context of a UK where the two primary political rivals for power were the Conservatives and what was originally the left as embodied in the Labour Party. Liberal centrists had been squeezed out early in the 20th Century.

In other words, they emerged within a party that was already a "natural governing party". Centrist New Democrats would do well to remember that context as it is critical.

While this strand of politics did result in three consecutive neo-Thatcherite "Labour" majority governments, whatever one thinks of those governments (and the subsequent failure of New Labour to deliver much of anything electorally since 2005) they very much evolved out of that historic context.

Similarly, in Canada the only three provinces that have seen relatively successful stretches of  NDP Third Way governance, British Columbia 1991-2001, Saskatchewan 1991-2007 and Manitoba 1999-2016, all occurred within a context analogous to the United Kingdom in the sense that the NDP had prior to these points evolved into the sole alternative to the major right wing party and the sole alternative that had any chance of defeating it.

In every single province, -- outside of Quebec where there is no NDP and where the political framework is different due to the national question --  as well as federally of course, where there is already a natural centrist alternative to the right in the form of the Liberal Party, the Third Way or shift-to-centre strategy has led to only one actual election to government (Nova Scotia) since 1995.

Even in the contexts of BC and Saskatchewan, the NDP has now been out of power for 15 and 9 years respectively and both just recently lost elections again.

I think the reasons for this are both fundamental and even existential to the NDP as a party.

While it is almost a cliche among left critics of the NDP to say that "Canada does not need a second Liberal Party" it really does seem that Canada does not need a second Liberal Party!

Socialist or social democratic politics, foundational ties to labour and a working-class viewpoint gave the NDP a reason to exist. As the ideological and serious programmatic differences between the NDP and Liberals become smaller and smaller (and insisting that your party is "more progressive" or "really progressive" is not an ideological or programmatic difference!) the raison-d'etre of the party becomes less-and-less clear and does so without having actually achieved anything meaningful electorally!

As we have seen, quite the opposite. It is a trade off with no payoff.

This makes critiques like Gerson's or the instance by NDP centrists or establishment hacks on the validity of their approach more than a little bit ironic.

So it would seem that the NDP can either hope for another historical "perfect storm" that would allow it to forever replace the Liberal Party in one or more of these provinces or federally or it can attempt to make itself relevant and an electoral force on its own terms and fighting for a serious and real alternative to mainstream capitalist politics.

Given recent evidence and the obvious shifts in attitudes politically that are occurring in countries like the US and UK, there is no reason to think that the latter has any less chance of success than the former and it has the distinct advantage of being meaningful and opening up the possibility of changing Canada's political discourse as the CCF and NDP did in the past -- which is exactly why so many on the right want to see the NDP stagnating in the swamp of the mushy middle.

In the end, when Cheri DiNovo calls for a democratic socialist NDP, despite all the inane mockery, she is calling for the only thing that may yet save the NDP from the perpetual irrelevance of trying so desperately to become something that already exists.

See also: NDP inhibits internal democracy with steep leadership race entry fee

See also: There was no NDP Leap

It is not "political correctness" that hurts the poor Mr. Kay, it is systemic oppression and those who enable it

Oh my God!!!

Stop the presses everyone! It turns out a well known right-winger -- in this case Jonathan Kay, formerly of the flophouse Conrad Black vanity rag The National Post, now editor of The Walrus -- has discovered that "political correctness" is hurting poor people!

How is it doing this?

After starting his piece by talking about the terrible hardships caused in some markets by the staggering housing prices that have been created by the real estate bubble, according to Kay it is because a "a narrow fixation on identity politics has compromised the left’s traditional focus on wide-angle issues of socio-economic stratification, poverty, and income inequality."

What does he base this sweeping and rather astounding generalization on? Well on the actions of the Mayor of Vancouver related to the release of one single study and:

...from what I’ve read on social media and in Walrus editorial submissions, many activists and pundits seem far more comfortable striking positions on highly compartmentalized identity-politics issues that can be reduced to succinct, tweet-able messages. Accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, in particular, can encourage a pack mentality—and so politicians such as Robertson are (understandably) terrified of arousing accusations that they harbour impure thoughts.

He then goes on to assert that:

a generation ago, opposition to the Canada–United States free-trade deal and nafta were the dominant obsessions of the Canadian left. And rightly so. Globalization has revolutionized our economy, creating whole new classes of winners and losers. By contrast, news of last year’s Trans-Pacific Partnership—the largest trade deal in history—was treated for the most part as an obscurity. Progressive media were far more interested in culture-war battles over the likes of #OscarsSoWhite, niqabs , and Donald Trump. Important Canadian stories with enormous economic impact continue to get short shrift.

Seriously. He claims all this.

Kay is just the latest in a long list of right-wingers offering that most disingenuous of all advice, the lecturing of the the left on how to "do" the leftism they themselves actually vigorously oppose.

What he says is total, demonstrable and absolute nonsense.

No one was even talking about income inequality in any serious way prior to the Occupy  Movement, whatever its flaws may have been. And only the left continues to, all the time, in every left-wing forum anyone takes ten seconds to look in anywhere at all! The idea that this is not a primary focus of the left is beyond ludicrous.

Has Kay somehow remained blissfully unaware of the $14 and $15 Now living wage movements across the United States and Canada that have been fighting for union rights and an end to poverty wages and that have made these issues front-and-centre on the political agenda?

This was not due to the benevolent indulgence of right wingers like Kay! It was due to mass mobilization by leftists and labour and union activists. The exact opposite of what he claims.

Did he sleep through the mass and very vocal opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? This has been the focus of countless initiatives, forums and fights and, unlike in the mainstream or right-wing press, the left-wing press is flooded with articles about it.

In fact, rabble.ca alone has had, even by just a cursory count, in excess of 30 posts about the TPP so far this year! The notion that the TPP has been treated as "obscure" is moronic.

Frankly, what the fuck is Kay talking about?

There have always been those, in both the right and the left, who act as if issues around anti-racism, homophobia and women's rights somehow "detract" from the "real" issues that the left supposedly should be dealing with.

But, news flash to white dudes with good jobs, these ARE all issues directly related to poverty to begin with! Systemic racism, sexism and homophobia and the structural results of these oppressions leave countless millions poor in addition to the other vicious indignities and injustices that stem from them.

But, beyond that, the issues are not even remotely mutually exclusive, and while Kay may be able to find some isolated examples here-or-there, in fact the vast bulk of leftists see these struggles as all interconnected. As part of a totality of struggle for human emancipation.

Of course Jonathan Kay would think that "political correctness" is somehow hurting the poor. This is an easy, though rather facile and silly thing to say. It deflects from the real narratives in the media and beyond that are actually hurting those living in poverty and that are the right wing narratives.

You know, the ones that regularly excuse inequality and injustice as byproducts of the capitalist system and as "inevitable" and that pretend that women, the racialized, the marginalized and those living in poverty really have nothing to get bent out of shape about.

They denounce "political correctness" as opposed to the systems that create the poverty and inequality in the first place and as opposed to the ugly and institutionalized pillars of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia and class that maintain and ensure them.

If Jonathan Kay wants to "call out" someone who has a history of writing for, editing and supporting publications, writers and newspapers that directly and openly attacked anyone fighting for economic justice and equality, maybe he should start with himself.

Recent pretensions aside, it is how he has spent most of his career.

See also: In praise of the "social justice warrior"

See also: The myth of the leftist, feminist, anti-racist, elitist

The Toronto Sun and National Post think Tom Mulcair should stay on? No way!

While an increasing number of people are questioning the very grip on reality of the members of a political organization -- in this case the NDP -- who would consider supporting as their "leader" a politician who had blown an historic opportunity as badly as Tom Mulcair did, happily for Mulcair there are those rushing to his defense.

The editorial board of the Toronto Sun and National Post columnists!

That is right -- the right is rallying to keep him on as leader of a nominally social democratic party that there is absolutely no chance they would endorse during a general election whether led by Tom Mulcair, Tommy Douglas, Tony Blair or Karl Marx.

Given that their politics is antithetical (allegedly) to the NDP's, the question is why they would bother?

On the surface both the Sun's board and Post columnist Michael Den Tandt claim that he is a strong leader who could have won it all but was derailed by circumstance -- namely the niqab issue in Quebec and his misunderstood stance on balanced budgets. Both claim that the niqab stand showed that he was a man of principle and both feel he will be vindicated on balanced budgets when Trudeau's "ultra-ambitious" (to quote Den Tandt) spending promises cause the deficit to spiral out-of-control and the sky to fall or whatever else right-wingers feel will happen anytime anyone suggests the very stimulus spending that actually saved capitalism in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

They never do seem to remember those huge Conservative stimulus deficits do they?

Both mock left critics of Mulcair as being hopelessly out-of-touch, demented socialists, etc, etc, etc.

In truth, all of their defenses of Mulcair really do not hold up terribly well under scrutiny.

The niqab issue is a total canard tossed around by party apologists that simply makes no sense given that Trudeau took just as forceful a stance on the issue as did Mulcair and in equally strong terms. When pressed on this people using this line can never explain why this issue supposedly derailed the one campaign but not at all the other. Perhaps it was moonbeams or reverse pyramid power.

Or perhaps is was that Mulcair always came off as inauthentic when Trudeau did not.

As to his apparent "fiscal prudence" what they leave out is that Mulcair still insisted that his program, such as it was, could be realized while he could also commit to balanced budgets.  Canadians smelled a rat as this was obvious nonsense. Given that it was clear that any government that won the election was going to be facing a deficit the fact is that there were two alternatives -- deficit spending or austerity and cutbacks.

Trudeau was the only leader offering the former and Canadians chose his vision over either the outright promise of austerity by Harper or a narrative from Mulcair that reeked of being a campaign trail fiction and would have proven to have been had he been elected.

The Toronto Sun even went so far as to haul out the old myth that "successful prairie socialism in Canada -- unlike its failed eastern Canadian cousin -- has a history of expanding the welfare state, while being fiscally responsible." The problem with this decontextualized nonsense, among other things, is that, as commentator Fraser Needham pointed out here on The Left Chapter a few months ago, it is simply not true!

As for Mulcair's much vaunted leadership skills, the election result sort of speaks for itself on that front. Given the incredibly centralized nature of the NDP and its campaigns now there really is no one else to blame for this fiasco than Mulcair and his immediate "strategists" and party enforcers.

But these surface arguments act as little more than cover for what really lies at the heart of their desire to see Mulcair stick around.

Part of this is likely that Mulcair has made the NDP so similar to the Liberals ideologically that these pundits are hoping that given another toss at the crapshoot that is bourgeois electoral politics in Canada right now, Mulcair just might eat into enough Liberal support in 2019 to allow the Conservatives to topple Trudeau, who they despise with a deep and abiding passion.

But more broadly, as long as Mulcair or someone like him leads the NDP then there is no meaningful left in Canada. His leadership of what was once a socialist party represents a triumph of the neo-liberal and capitalist narrative in Canadian politics.

If Canada's "social democratic" party is led by someone who shares their fondness for the memory of Margaret Thatcher, austerity inducing commitments to balance budgets regardless of circumstance and who would never use the term socialist to describe himself or his politics under any circumstances, then they have won in the grand debate over what type of economy the country should have fundamentally.

While they may well be right that an avowedly socialist or even stridently social democratic NDP would not "win" the next election, it would have a reason to exist as something other than a second liberal capitalist party and its presence would push the political discourse to the left as the NDP and CCF did for decades and as Bernie Sanders is doing in the United States right now.

Why do the Toronto Sun and National Post columnists want Mulcair to continue to lead the NDP?

Because as long as he does there can be no inspiring and interesting Sanders like campaign and there can be no chance of a Canadian version or echo of Corbyn. The NDP will remain fundamentally irrelevant and  continue to pose no threat of any kind to the system even were it to get elected.

And why would these right-wingers not want to see that?

See also: Just forget about a Canadian Corbyn -- How a lackluster left in Canada gets the Mulcair it deserves

See also: The NDP, Nathan Cullen, Paul Dewar and the Canadian social democratic delusion

Stephen Harper's dog-whistle: Islamophobia and Canadian politics

It is rare that a politician, elected or otherwise,  openly admits that he or she is capitulating to the bigoted and "irrational" fears of his or her constituents, but that is exactly what Shawinigan, Que. Mayor Michel Angers did on Friday.

At a press conference he held to explain his council's frankly inane decision not to allow the minor rezoning of an industrial park so that a small mosque could be built there, he bluntly acknowledged that, in opposition to his own beliefs, pressure from people "across the province" had motivated them.

While it is nice to see honesty from our political class, it makes the decision of him and his council no less gutless.

Angers went on to say "people in Shawinigan aren't afraid of Muslims", which is a rather absurd contention after calling these same people out for being irrationally afraid! It is obvious that growing numbers of Canadians, and by no means just in Quebec, encouraged by the media and the rhetoric of right-wing politicians, are very much afraid, irrationally so, of Islamics, Canadian or otherwise.

Fear of the "other", of the immigrant or perceived outsider and the use of racially charged or bigoted rhetoric has long been a staple in the right's political armoury and 2015, an election year, is certainly proving no different in Canada.

Stephen Harper, rebounding in the polls and looking for a wedge issue to use to campaign, as Ricochet's Derrick O'Keefe phrased it, on the politics of "fear instead of hope", has seized on the supposed threat of "jihadists" and "radical Islam" and is openly pulling out the dog-whistle around issues like Bill C-51 and now the terrible decision of his government to appeal the clearly unconstitutional law that forces women who chose to wear one to remove their niqab facial coverings during a Canadian citizenship swearing ceremony.

The government, in other words, will spend a considerable amount of money in what they almost certainly know will be an unsuccessful appeal to fight to keep in place a law that applies to only a tiny number of people and that accomplishes absolutely nothing given that there are many other ways to establish identity.

It does accomplish one thing, however. It allows Harper to stand up in the media and call a specific type of religious dress "offensive" both during a citizenship ceremony and more generally, and that is, in fact, the entire point of the legal appeal.

Sadly, he is likely not wrong that this will pander to many Canadian perceptions as other commentators, like Kelly McParland in the National Post, have noted.

And not just right wing Canadians. Unfortunately many on the left and many secularists have bought into simplistic narratives around the niqab, as I have written about before, and have helped to enable and embolden the right by allowing them to cloak themselves with the claim they are standing up for women's rights, when this is not what they care about in any way..

Regarding the denial of a zoning change, one Shawinigan resident said "I'm afraid so, I support the decision. I'm afraid of attacks...Muslims have the right to live just like us, as long as they stay very, very calm."

This is the type of ludicrous and Islamophobic thinking among Canadians, and voters, that Harper has in mind when he makes the comments he does.

Women's rights and human rights have nothing at all to do with it.

picture via wikimedia commons