Thursday, March 15, 2007

Stockwell Day: Blame Haiti For Crystal Meth!

In my on-going efforts to make Conservatives look stupid(er), I make a point of reading Stockwell Day's column in the Penticton Western News every Wednesday. And this Wednesday, I think, I may have uncovered a genuine Gotcha! moment.

Most of the piece is gushy slop about how Canadian dollars are helping the Republic of Haiti. But it ends with the following odd pronouncement:

Dollars from Canada are carefully directed. Shutting down a drug cartel in Haiti means less cocaine or crystal meth imported onto our own streets....

Now, I am willing to be corrected on this, but a google search of "Haiti and Crystal Meth" in "News" brings up exactly one item--Stockwell's Wednesday column! And indeed most accounts of Crystal Meth addiction in the Canadian context suggest that the stuff is mostly home-made.

Furthermore, a broader on-line search suggests that, while Burma and other points in Asia are making "Ice" and shipping it around the Pacific rim, Haiti is not among the producers.

So what is going on here? Maybe Stockwell can't tell Haitians from the Burmese, or maybe he thought he needed to mention a second drug to make his sentence balance out. But it looks to me as though Canada's Minister of Public Safety, in the process of pumping up his government's achievements overseas, has sloppily retailed falsehoods about a small, poor country that, lets face it, has enough problems already without being dubbed an exporter of crystal meth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just another example of how the Cons will say anything about anyone for their own aims. Truth means nothing to the Cons. Soundbites and tricking foolish people into voting for them is the stock in trade of the Cons.