by arthur Weinreb,
September 6, 2004
The Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCaP) recently held a violent protest at a home that was hosting a BBQ for prominent members of the Ontario Liberal Party. While OCaP head John Clarke stood back with his trusty megaphone, his ragtag band of street urchins and misguided university students attempted to swarm the party. as usually happens in civilized society, the protesters were thwarted by the police. There were a few arrests and one little girl protester suffered a mild concussion in a confrontation with Toronto’s finest. Oh, the horror of it all.
after the protest, Clarke was quoted in the Toronto Sun as saying that OCaP is a "serious organization". Now there are a lot of serious organizations around--the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the United Way just to name a couple. These organizations differ from OCaP because they never feel the need to tell the media or anyone else that they are indeed "serious".
Clarke’s statement of OCaP’s seriousness is reminiscent of former U.S. president Bill Clinton saying to the world in which he was the most powerful person, "I am relevant". after the Republicans swept the House and the Senate in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton had to convince himself, if no one else, that he was indeed relevant.
So it is with Clarke. Clarke realizes full well that his rag tag group of street urchins has no relevance in society and therefore has to say that his group is serious, to convince himself and his union financiers of a reason for the group’s existence.
If OCaP does have a purpose, they don’t express it very well. By disrupting events that are held on private property they lose much of the support that they could otherwise garner. although OCaP can in no way be compared to the Chechen and arab terrorists that took great delight in murdering infants and children, like those terrorists, any point that they are trying to make is completely subsumed by the actions that they engage in. If OCaP was trying to draw attention to the plight of the homeless, they failed. OCaP was only successful in drawing attention to OCaP.
The media reported what the coalition did but not why. The "why" seemed to be as irrelevant to the press as it is to OCaP. If you want to know what their purported purpose in disrupting the Liberal party, you have to visit their website.
apparently OCaP seems to think that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has been a tad less than truthful. according to the message on their site, "There is a deep feeling of bitterness in the communities of Ontario over the shameless falsehood of the Liberals."
Falsehood of the Liberals? If this little rag tag army of leeches ever knew how mainstream their observations about Ontario’s premier were, they would choke on their government issue cheques. Dalton McGuinty is a self confessed liar of the first order. We all know that. No one needs to swarm a private party to point that out.
If OCaP is truly trying to help the homeless, their actions failed miserably. The actions of OCaP serve only to anger people against the organization; it does nothing to make them more sympathetic towards the plight of those who live on the streets.
In this regard, the actions of OCaP are about as useless as those taken (or not taken) by the lefties on city council. They love to leave the homeless, sleeping in public places such as City Hall to help their buddies in the homeless industry. Leaving people fending for themselves on the street does nothing to help the homeless and accomplishes nothing other than to turn Toronto, once known as "Toronto the good", as an undesirable place to live, work and visit. But David Miller, Toronto’s Mayor and Chief Panhandler, thinks that by leaving the homeless loitering all over the city will force the other levels of government to fork over more money and solve all the city’s problems for him.
When John Clarke has to say that the Ontario Coalition against Poverty is a serious organization, you know that it is not.