While everyone else is rushing to gawk at the PC Party of Ontario dumpster fire, we’re at least TRYING to talk about the shady practices of our Liberal Premier and her party.
Lost in the tumult of the last few weeks has been the story of how Deanna Natale, aka Deanna Sgro, Ontario Liberal Party candidate for the riding of Humber River-Black Creek and daughter of Judy Sgro, the experienced Liberal MP for the federal riding of the same name, was censured for sending out aggressive debt collection letters.
How bad were the letters? Well, the Law Society of Upper Canada ruling on Sgro/Natale’s practices called them “abusive.” The Star story shares a few heartbreaking anecdotes about seniors getting shaken down and threatening phone calls which sound like something out of one of those CRA scams you hear about.
Then, because ignoring abuse until it becomes impossible to ignore is just how this government rolls, we’ve got damning reports of “belittling, gossip-mongering, bullying and a tendency to unduly punish employees” at the Ministry of the Attorney General. While the initial reporting described several out of control bureaucrats, later articles decided to focus in on former assistant deputy AG Mahila Wilson as the primary target, because the audience tends to get overwhelmed if the movie has more than one villain.
Now, Kathleen Wynne and her Liberals take claims of abuse very, very seriously. So seriously that when a woman, who knew Kathleen Wynne all the way back to her days as a school trustee, made an allegation of groping and harassment against a Liberal MPP back in 2006, nothing was done about it until now and the first thing Wynne said when asked for comment was to reassure everyone that this MPP wasn’t part of the McGuinty government, or hers. How comforting.
As for the situation at the AG Ministry, everyone’s following the process and the process is being followed and steps are being taken. It’s irresponsible for anyone to make any sort of conclusion at this time.
The Sgro story itself, it should be said, is small potatoes. Wynne is, of course sticking by her candidate with the full knowledge that if Sgro were a conservative there’d be weeks and weeks of calls for her to disavow. Wynne believes in the process that Sgro went through to publicly expiate herself from her sins, and that process is sacrosanct, and that there’s nothing to see here, and everyone should get back to watching The Patrick Brown Reality Show. And….there’s very little else you can say about it, really.
And that, of course, is the real story here. Wynne has been living rent free, effectively on vacation, while we all jabber about the PC Party leadership race, which has its own sideshow in the form of Patrick Brown loyalists and party hacks publicly shooting at each other, to the point that whoever wins this donnybrook will rule over a bombed-out rock. Instead of journalists trying to cover stories like this Sgro sleaziness they seem to be more interested in undercutting one another than they are in exposing Liberal corruption.
This Inception of distractions piling on top of each other allows Wynne to get away with murder, which is, naturally, exactly how she wants it. And it’s a far more troubling indicator of how much political power she actually has — polls be damned — that all of the people who are supposed to be working to oust her are so completely distracted.
Raving Canuck 