I have a suspicion that no one bemoans the latest election loss of the B.C. NDP more than Black Press columnist Tom Fletcher. Had the B.C. NDP won, Mr. Fletcher would never have run out of hot topics to discuss. At present, however, Mr. Fletcher must be truly at loss, running out of material faster than a December day out of sunlight.
Looking at his latest column dedicated to the B.C. Teachers’ Federation and its evils, the poor man is seen reduced to trolling old news and stale stories stuck on the BCTF website and in the memory of former education ministers.
Mr. Fletcher agrees that “racism, homophobia and sexism” are within the purview of the BCTF, while the “poverty and globalization” can’t be possibly the topics a major education organization can be involved in. This is interesting. Although the BCTF’s statistics might be suspect, existence of child poverty in Canada is hardly in dispute.
While Mr. Fletcher is not enthused by the BCTF efforts to teach eight-year-olds basic lessons in compassion by encouraging donations to local food banks, he is outright indignant at the prospect of children exploring possible reasons behind the existence of poverty, especially if those are “taken directly from the tired old NDP policy book.”
The most amusing bit is found at the very end of the Mr. Fletcher’s column where he resorts to mining wisdom from none other than George Orwell, the very man, who is well-known for being a democratic socialist, a fighter for social justice, and even a redistributor-in-chief – the very world views that are so abhorrent to Mr. Fletcher.
Alex Posoukh