Rating: NNNNN
“It makes him look like a force to be reckoned with, like a player at the centre of things.”
Nik Nanos, president of SES Research, explains Jack Layton’s new cred following a poll showing the NDP at 20 per cent. We always knew our ultra-clever eco freak of a pol was a deft manoeuvrer. Let’s hope he holds his ground as the Libs start punching from the left. All power to his Grit-fighting finagling in this white-knuckle election jockeying.
More cop slop
The BS being shovelled taxpayers’ way to justify the $75,000 salaries cops will be taking home makes you wonder. By any measure, T.O. is already over-policed. What performance standard was the board looking at when it decided our cops deserve to be the highest paid in the land? Crime rates have been steadily declining for nearly a decade. And most cops barely work 35 hours a week. Thanks to this raise, the police budget will eat up an unconscionable $700 million of the city’s cash this year, 93 per cent for salaries and benefits. That’s almost $200 million more than in 2000. Bang for the buck or just a kick in the teeth?
If it ain’t weed, then what’s he on?
Now that he’s got a corporate rep to protect, Toronto Board of Trade prez Glen Grunwald can’t let any whiff of a suggestion he’s even been around pot – never mind actually smoked it – hang in the air. Grunwald was able to extract an apology from the Star after a story last week by sports columnist Dave Feschuk. No one who read the piece would get the idea that Grunwald partook in the green – except a paranoid Grunwald.
Anti-gun ralliers shooting blanks
“Guns, gangs, shootings, violence. Is this the new Toronto?” Well, not really. But so says Uniting Toronto Against Guns, a Tory-backed abomination that says it’s for “safer streets and stronger communities” (see story). Among its supporters the org lists Ontario security chief Julian Fantino, who you will remember adamantly opposed the Grits’ gun control laws when he was top dick in T.O. Fantino claimed it wouldn’t prevent crime. Mind-boggling, since most guns that are used in crimes are stolen from registered owners, according to CSIS and the RCMP. And they should know.
B’nai Brith’s little big man
We love that B’nai Brith has taken up the cause of disadvantaged native communities in the north. But making B’nai Brith executive VP Frank Dimant an honorary First Nations chief of the Manitoba Keewatinook Ininew Okimowin seems a little ill-advised to us. Have native elders forgotten Dimant’s dalliance with the old Canadian Alliance, which, like its predecessor, the Reform party, was hostile to the concerns of First Nations? Ancient history? That’s not something native people are in the habit of kissing off.
