The worst piece of journalism I have seen in a long time

The most spectacularly ugly piece of writing about Sunday’s blockade of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway by about 2000 Tamils isn’t in a comment box–though there was ugliness there to spare, to be sure–but is rather by Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail. With a title like "Whose rights are really being trampled?: Torontonians feel they’re being asked to suck up without complaint the complexities of an issue they’re expected to accept on faith" you would perhaps expect Blatchford, a journalist who won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for her reporting from Afghanistan, to maybe explain the nuances of the conflict to a readership that is struggling to understand all the issues at play. Instead we get a vile rant about the potential perils of immigration:

The truth is, no one really knows how many Tamils are in Toronto, or Canada. There was an astonishing piece in the Toronto Star earlier this spring trying - in vain, it should be noted - to make sense of the most recent Statistics Canada numbers (29,435 Tamils in the Greater Toronto Area) and the estimates of other studies (which suggest the number may be in excess of 200,000).

This is what Torontonians are wrestling with, not rage about traffic snarls, not racism, not a failure to understand the complexities of the civil war in Sri Lanka or its attendant loss of life. We live in a country where we don’t even know how many of our fellows are Tamils from Sri Lanka, but are simultaneously asked to accept on faith that they are properly and legally here and to extend to them every privilege conferred by Canadian citizenship - and to suck it up without complaint.

That’s the real question I suspect gnawing at many folks: Are the Tamils merely exercising their rights or have they somehow breached the covenant, unwritten but understood, they have or ought to have made with their new country?

Many Torontonians have long been puzzled by how without any public discussion they remember, let alone any consensus, their city has become home to so many folks from around the world who periodically hold the rest of the place hostage while they make their voices heard about the very issues or crises that drove them here in the first place.

I know already that some readers will argue that Tamils are Canadian, too, and of course they are, but I have to say this was not terribly in evidence Sunday night on the Gardiner Expressway for the now-notorious occupation.

There’s a lot of other nastiness in the piece as well, including a comparison between the Tamil demonstrators–no, not the LTTE, but the demonstrators in Toronto–and the Taliban, but let’s ignore that for now, and never mind the contention that protest should only be tolerated if it isn’t disruptive and thus easily ignored (because, you know, we should only protest in a polite and Canadian fashion while our relatives are being blown to shit in the final stages of a war of extermination on the other side of the world), and just look at what Blatchford has to say about immigration. This sentence is particularly worth singling out: "Some of us may harbour the suspicion that the Pierre Trudeau Liberals sneaked in nation-altering patterns of immigration on the sly, but we recognize the benefits and long ago accepted the fact of it." And then look at this analysis from Statistics Canada about the top countries of origin of immigrants to Canada: prior to Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister, immigrants to Canada came mainly from the British Isles, the United States, or Europe. During and after Trudeau, immigrants tended to come more from Hong Kong, China, India, and the Philippines. No comment is really necessary here.