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.
