Ford's crocodile tears

Adrian O'Connell | Apr 22, 2020

After recovering from nausea witnessing Doug Ford's shedding of crocodile tears at the premature demise of scores of Ontario elders for which his own government bears considerable responsibility because of its gross negligence in cutting back on inspections a year ago, we are now treated to a further display of vacuous insincerity as Ford and his privately schooled, home-pampered and privileged minister of education, Stephen Lecce, fawn over Apple Corporation's munificent donation of IPads to the province's needy schoolchildren. This coming hard on the heels of Ford's recent savage attacks on the public education system, only temporarily suspended in the face of the Covid 19 virus.

If the Premier had any dignity whatsoever, he would reject this unsavoury deal from Apple, a company which is internationally notorious for its crooked accounting and serial tax evasion efforts, which in 2017 led to its being fined billions of dollars by a less sympathetic and less fawning European Union.

To add to this fatuity, Toronto based Rogers Communications, have also chipped in their penny's worth, with alleged Internet freebies for kids and help for teachers which also evoked further gushing from Ford and Lecce. This despite the fact that also in 2017, a CBC investigation revealed that senior management at Rogers had conspired with the accounting firm of KPMG to set up a massive tax dodging scam in the Isle of Man, a money laundering island in the middle of the Irish Sea, in order to bilk Canadian coffers of billions.

Naturally, both Ford and Lecce have swallowed this piece of corporate PR, hook line and sinker, because it accords with their own underhand efforts to push e-learning at the expense of students, parents and teachers who already have resoundingly rejected such nonsense!

It is high time that these kinds of 'deals' with all their accompanying strings attached, were outlawed by legislatures and Parliament, since they clearly provide an insidious pathway as in this case towards the relentless undermining of democracy in sovereign states like Canada.

It is the primary purpose of government at all levels to care for citizens of all ages and if Ford and Lecce seriously wish to assist needy children as well as seniors, they could start by insisting that these slippery corporations pay their taxes and then ensure through legislation that individuals and families have sufficient income as a human right, and guaranteed shelter, housing, education and health care systems to sustain them throughout life and importantly, into old age, instead of accepting the contaminated crumbs thrown down by tax dodging industrialists which are expressly intended to corrupt and compromise the province's body politic long after the virus has run its course!

Adrian O'Connell