While often writing for the Left-leaning Toronto Star, Susan Delacourt nevertheless seems to be somewhat objective in her views, frequently bashing aspects of both the major political parties in this country. Yet a recent opinion piece in the Star led me to wonder if she was not in fact trying to appear neutral while not really being so. Her April 23 article was entitled “Bashing the rich is always in style” and it contained a fundamental bit of “disinformation” that would suggest she is really just another “liberal” propagandist.
As evidence of a “conservative” aversion to the wealthy, she begins by citing Pierre Pollievre’s recent criticism of Justin Trudeau’s acceptance of “an $80,000 gifted vacation that obviously comes with an IOU.” Trudeau countered by suggesting Pollievre’s attempt to conscript billionaire Elon Musk in exposing the biases of the CBC as “government funded media,” represented a willingness to profit from his wealthy friends no different from his own. Delacourst seems to agree, her article insisting that both political parties here in Canada seem equally eager to profit from the general public’s resentment of the inordinately wealthy.
But this is a gross distortion of the facts! The Left never stops excoriating Capitalism, the “privileged” rich and the apparently loathsome gap between them and the poor. Pollievre was quite right in attempting to highlight the hypocrisy of one who consistently pushes this narrative, one who has gone so far as to express his admiration for the regimes of China and Cuba, while nevertheless showing no reluctance to take advantage of the sort of “privileges” he apparently loathes.
I put the word “privilege” in quotation marks when it is used to impugn one who has actually earned what he has achieved. Ironically, Justin Trudeau is privileged in the most pejorative sense of that word. His qualifications when he entered the political arena in no way entitled him to the success he has had. Were his last name not Trudeau, he might be working at a Walmart today. His father’s panache as a politician quite literally granted him the sort of arbitrary benefits which he and most on the Left customarily ascribe to successful Capitalists without ever explaining how their accumulated wealth is in any way arbitrary! No, in the demented world of contemporary “progressivism,” the rich are tainted simply because they are rich.
Delacourt’s article, then, would seem to be a veiled attempt to obfuscate the fact that resentment of the rich is a fundamental tool of the political Left. At one point she says: “All of this wealth-bashing is obviously rooted in the issue of income inequality….” But “conservatives,” while certainly not condoning the sometimes unethical practices of the rich, tend to see “income inequality” as the inevitable result of the obvious, disparate attributes of the species. They “bash” the wealthy, that is, only when they truly deserve it. Theirs is a sensible approach to the freedoms engendered in Capitalism rather than that arbitrarily oppressive one espoused by the Left whose irrationality Ms. Delacourt seems intent on simply ignoring.