Last Saturday, the Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCaP) held a demonstration in Rosedale, one of Toronto's toniest neighborhoods. In a show of solidarity with Ontario's poor and in an attempt to frighten those more fortunate, the protesters marched through the Rosedale area shouting slogans like "We're hungry, we're angry, we won't go away. Stop the war on the poor; make the rich pay!"
That's what's so wonderful about the loonie left; their ability to reason through doggerel verse. The implication is that poor people in Ontario wouldn't be poor, if only we confiscated the assets belonging to the rich. Certainly this seems to be the belief of one of the protest leaders, Sarah Vance, who claimed that the tax breaks the Ontario Tories gave to every rich person amounted to the welfare payments that were taken away from 17 poor families. It's an interesting statistic that leaves one wondering where it originated.
OCaP has long been a violent quasi-criminal organization much more interested in punishing the rich than in helping the poor. Here's a novel idea that I'll bet no one at OCaP has ever thought of: jobs! Instead of protesting and attempting to intimidate "the rich", why not help "the poor" help themselves through work? Or is that too reactionary an idea for those old-timey socialists heading up OCaP?
On this issue no proverb is more apt than the one that states "Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for a lifetime".
OCaP would be much more helpful to the poor if they actively encouraged them to seek job training and helped them find work. Demanding a larger welfare stipend will only serve to prolong the scandalous poverty and hopelessness under which this underclass is forced to live. It will do nothing to foster their self-reliance or self-esteem.
But that's the thing about people who run organization such as OCaP. They have a vested interest in keeping the poor in poverty and making sure that those who are downtrodden remain so, as any change from the status quo would eliminate their usefulness. So best these mental midgets can accomplish is to get a hundred or so people out on the street on a Saturday night to shout slogans. What an abject bunch of failures!
It's interesting to note that few people seem to have the ability to learn from history. Least of all the OCaP crowd. I seem to recall reading about a similar protest that took place in October of 1917 in a place called St. Petersburg, the result of which culminated in making an entire country equally poor, except, of course, for the leaders of that "protest". and while the result of that "demonstration" in 1917 took over 80 years to undo, it eventually resulted in the deaths of untold millions of people and the ultimate destruction of any human spirit who functioned within that system.
I regret that people such as Sarah Vance or John Clarke, one of OCaP's founders, haven't had the opportunity to experience their brand of despotism first-hand. Who knows, they might now be chanting a different tune.
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