It is often worth a minute or so to answer the polls run by our local Barrie Today Internet Newspaper. The publication hardly gives the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail any concern but is the most aggressive of the totally bad choices of local media here in Barrie since we lost our long struggling newspaper the Barrie Examiner, which did a reasonable job of reporting the city’s news and obituaries for some 153 years.
If I did not have a summer cold, and feeling like crap, I would probably be in a better mood. If you wanted my advice on media in Barrie and if I was in a better mood, I would suggest finding a radio station you can tolerate for breaking news and getting the Saturday Toronto Star which is chock-full of interesting obits.
But this commentary is about a particular stupid poll, the electronic newspaper was taking and the disgusting results. They asked their readers to tell them who was the best prime minister of Canada in the last half century and then the worst prime minister in the same period. I was disgusted that they forgot all about dear old Joe Clark, prime minister from June 1979 to March 1980. He was prime minister of a conservative caucus who unfortunately could not count.
Funny story about that; I worked for an American computer company at the time and the then American president of the Canadian company was interested in politics. I took him to a fund-raising dinner for the conservative prime minister in Toronto. While eating our dinner, I remarked that it was very appropriate that the conservatives were throwing a turkey dinner on American Thanksgiving. He looked down at his dinner and said, “This is Rock Cornish Hen, not turkey.”
I answered, “The turkey is the after-dinner speaker.”
He agreed with me after the dinner when he conceded that the best speech of the evening was when prime minister Joe Clark was introduced by the then premier of Ontario, Bill Davis.
But what annoyed me about that poll was that a third of the Barrie voters picked Stephen Harper and less than 20 per cent picked Pierre Trudeau. It is likely that only about half of Barrie voters would be old enough to have seen and heard from Pierre Trudeau. This country needs better history books.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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