by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
July 26, 2004
God was fed up. So one Monday morning He notified all the media outlets that things had gone too far and that He would end the world on Wednesday.
Tuesday morning’s headline in the Globe and Mail was "World to end tomorrow --markets expected to decline sharply".
The front page of the Toronto Sun screamed "We’re Gone!!!"
and the headline in the Toronto Star was "World ends tomorrow--women and minorities to be hardest hit".
So it was no surprise that the Toronto’s Star’s big criticism of Paul Martin’s new cabinet was that the number of women ministers fell by two from 11 to nine. There wasn’t much else about the cabinet, described by the Star in an understatement as "leaning left" that the newspaper could fault. It was close to being a dream team to the left wing daily as it could ever get. Former NDP premier Ujjal Dosanjh is the new Minister of Health who has already said that he will take steps to prevent Canadians from using their health cards to obtain diagnostic tests from machines that are owned by the big bad private sector. and Bill Graham, described by the Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington as "dainty" is the new Minister of Defence. Not much chance Canada will be involved with war and stuff anytime soon.
But the Toronto Star couldn’t help but be obsessed by the fact that there are two less women in cabinet than there was two weeks ago. On July 21, the Star’s Ottawa Bureau Chief, Susan Delacourt wrote an article with sub-headline "Group criticizes Martin’s decision". Who is this group you say? It happens to Equal Voice whose sole function seems to be to promote women in politics. The group was outraged by the fact that more women ministers were not appointed and they noted the strong anecdotal evidence that women were responsible for the Liberals obtaining a minority government and not the Conservatives. This theory is based upon the premise that women scare more easily and were therefore more susceptible to Martin’s campaign of fear mongering. If women are so scared, what is anne McLellan doing as Minister of Public Security? Oh well, it’s not like we think that security is important, like who pays for MRI machines or the Kyoto accord.
If this article wasn’t enough, which it obviously wasn’t it was followed the next day by an article by Bruce Campion-Smith, also of the Ottawa Bureau. What was described the previous day as a decline of women in the number of women ministers has now become a "dearth of women in cabinet". It seems the major purpose of this article was to give former MP Sheila Copps, who is adept at blaming her gender when things do not go her way, a chance to rant on the subject.
and the Star also had to make the point (it sure took them long enough--one would have thought it would have made the paper the previous day) to mention that Jean augustine, who is not only a woman but a black woman, was dropped from Martin’s cabinet.
The Toronto Star, if nothing else, is predictable.