51. The seasonal polka dance

Published
16 April 1997

Re: New Democrats, Old Ideas —Editorial, 16 April. Your editorial writers are too quick to condemn the federal NDP for favouring politics over principle, for missing a “lost opportunity”, and for writing a “shallow” document apparently guarded — in this morbid and musty telling — by “the dead hand of inertia [that] rests comfortably upon it.”
Since the 1870’s when, as historians have written, publisher George Brown exploited the labour market and sympathised with “the deserving poor,” The Globe and Mail has institutionally advanced initiatives and economic policies that exacerbate class differences of opportunity and reward. Henceforth at the newspaper for the “better educated and better salaried” it has been the job of some to report on the resulting inequities (see Dollars and Sense — Report on Business, 12 April) while others are employed to tell all and sundry what to do and how and how not to think.
It is once again the season for your editorial writers to perform their pre-election polkas claiming that if their ideological dance cards were not already full they could be better socialists than the NDP. Such editorial writers who know how to “think seriously” about “exploring ways to redistribute wealth ” should not engage in useless hectoring or false modesty. What are their corrective solutions?