Wed Mar 23/05
The Sun can't shine every day

After an unexplained two-month break, Licia Corbella is back on the Calgary Sun's opinion pages — back with a big, crappy bang. On March 19 there was a hit piece on Ontario Liberal backbencher Ruby Dhalla, whom I'd never heard of, based on some c-list foofaraw (scroll down… way down) that I'd also never heard of. And three days later there was, I kid you not, another hit piece on Ruby Dhalla. In an hilarious (but ultimately inferior) reprise of her broken record routine about Canada Steamship Lines' flags of convenience vis-à-vis the Paul Martin/Danny Williams affair, Corbella essentially filed the same column twice. To wit:

[March 19] I have not seen a copy of the pamphlet, so I asked Dhalla to read to me the statements she found most "shocking". 

The pamphlet, complained Dhalla, is entitled: Is Christianity under attack in Canada? 

Then she read the following: "'The government has launched a campaign of intimidation to silence churches by dispatching tax collectors to threaten the charitable tax status of denominations who speak out against the Liberal government.'"

[March 22] I still have not seen the pamphlet, but I had Dhalla read to me the statements she found most "outrageous." 

She read the following: "'The government has launched a campaign of intimidation to silence churches by dispatching tax collectors to threaten the charitable tax status of denominations who speak out against the Liberal government.'"

_________________________

[March 19] I also asked Dhalla how she would characterize the bigoted poll Liberals engaged in last April when it (sic) asked voters "if they'd be more or less likely to vote for the Conservatives if they knew the party had been "taken over by evangelical Christians." [No idea what those quotation marks are meant to indicate. –ed.]

Such questions are an example of U.S.-style "push polling," where the purpose is not to gauge public opinion, but to "push" a negative opinion about one's opponent.

[March 22] I asked her about the Liberal government asking Ontario voters in a poll if they'd be more or less likely to vote for the Conservatives if they knew the party had been 'taken over by evangelical Christians.' Such questions are an example of U.S.-style "push polling," where the purpose is not to gauge public opinion, but to "push" a negative opinion about one's opponent.

Is this a western thing or what? Why would any editor think that Calgarians would be interested in two stories in three days about a complete nobody, even if it is a Liberal nobody? Oh, wait. Corbella's the editor. I guess that explains that.

By all means also check out her contribution today (that's four columns in five days). It's called "Key point missed in Schiavo case," which describes her column perfectly. My favourite part is definitely as follows:

Michael Schiavo conveniently calls his common-law wife his "girlfriend," but by law, she is his wife. That means he has two wives — both of whom are recognized by law in the U.S. — and that means he should either be charged with bigamy… or he should be forced to divorce Terri.

[UPDATE Thu Mar 24/05. In addition to being very nutty, it appears that this is also flat-out wrong: Florida doesn't recognize common-law marriages. No response from Corbella as yet...]

But it's also fun how she accepts the dubious/delusional accounts of Terri's family as iron-clad truth, which results in the following howlers:

Her brain may not function the same or as well as the rest of us, but it doesn't mean that her life is of less value than the rest of us. Otherwise, what's next? Do we start killing off people with low IQs?

Terri... is very much alive.

The Sun's op/ed pages are nipping at the heels of Usenet and Shotgun comment threads for the preferred habitat of semi-literate Angry Albertan drivel. I don't care if it aims low — it's ridiculous, and it ought to get better. Hopefully market forces will force it to: with just a 37 percent share, the Sun is getting slaughtered by the Herald. Averaged out daily, just 7.2 percent of Calgarians read it.¹ In fact, the only English-language Canadian metropolitan newspapers read by a lower percentage of their cities' inhabitants are the Montreal Gazette, the Halifax Daily News, and, ahem, the Winnipeg Sun, Ottawa Sun and Toronto Sun. This is somewhat heartening: stupid still sells, no doubt, but perhaps not as well as, you know, not quite as stupid.