The one problem we have to be realistic about is that ideologues are willing to kill people to support their political beliefs. The disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec is the latest case in point. When you gut a department’s budget, you can hardly be surprised when it can no longer do its job. When Transport Canada has to let railroads run hazardous materials with a single trainman through urban Canada, there is little excuse for people who believe companies can be self-regulating.
It is a legacy that Prime Minister Stephen Harper learned from former Ontario Premier Michael Harris. Sitting in a backyard overlooking beautiful Lake Couchiching, Ontario yesterday, the hostess opined that Michael Harris as Ontario’s Premier was not her cup of tea but he actually did a few things right. You had to agree with her but the caveat was that if he did the right thing he did it for the wrong reasons.
Yet one of Harris’ most serious failures was when seven people died from E. coli contacted through the Walkerton, Ontario water system. Harris’ savage spending cuts had left nobody competent minding the store.
While Prime Minister Stephen Harper rejected the claim that his government’s cutbacks in food inspection had led to the Listeriosis outbreak in August, 2008, the deaths involved were acknowledged by Maple Leaf Foods. The company would certainly have preferred that better third party inspection such as by the Canada Food Inspection Agency had kept it free of the problems.
But the Prime Minister could not deny that the lax attitudes towards food inspection caused the largest recall of meat in Canada’s history in 2012. XL Foods of Brooks, Alberta was ill prepared for what the company thought was an unlikely event. The vast plant had shipped 12,000 tonnes of product across Canada, into the United States and to other parts of the world before the thinly stretched number of food inspectors realized there was E. coli contamination.
Many of the ideological actions of the Conservative government currently in power have already to come back to haunt Canadians. The harm their attitudes are causing to foreign relations is reverberating in the United Nations. Their attitude towards birth control is harming relations in Africa and other third-world areas. Locating embassies in British facilities loses us stature. Our toadying to the Americans loses us friends. Canada is no longer the honest broker, the peace-keeper.
And there will be more of the sins of ideology uncovered when a more liberal government takes over after the 2015 general election.
-30-
Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]