You can't always want what you get

 A few thoughts about an exchange I was involved in over on Twitter yesterday.Names have been changed to protect the guilty. 

The first tweet was from a reasonably well-known TV reporter:

* Another $15-billion-plus in new spending announced today by Justin Trudeau to extend wage and rent subsidies and boost innovation. And we haven't even got to a budget yet. This government sure knows how to spend even though many Canadians have never had more in savings.

This promptly got this response from a Toronto Star columnist:

* Which Canadians?

The obvious implication, given the political leanings of the Star, was that it was only rich Canadians. Thus these responses soon afterward:

* Best question of the day! These sweeping statements and "headlines" now are purely to trigger and very uninformed. " I was talking to some people" ....

* Canadians who had high-profile careers in media, had employers to indemnify them when they wrote defamatory articles, and retired to play golf and opine.

* (reasonably well-known TV reporter) and his friends.

The next response was from your esteemed blogger, as follows:

* StatsCan data just yesterday showed that the household savings rate in Q4/2020 was over 12 percent. Also showed that lower income groups fared surprisingly well in terms of incomes in 2020.

I was braced for some insulting responses basically calling for me to eff off along with the StatsCan I rode in on, but to my great surprise, the comments virtually dried up right away. My real issue, though, is with the Toronto Star columnist. You might think that the Star, which is unbendingly pro-Liberal, would have seen the StatsCan data as proof that the Federal Government's pandemic income support schemes, while they are wildly expensive, are working well. That is, after all, the truth, as was well explained by columnist Don Pittis over at the CBC website. Instead all we got from the Star was a snarky comment from a columnist who had likely not bothered to look at the actual data.

This points to an essential truth about the Star's journalism. It's heavily based on giving a platform to victimhood, both real and manufactured. If that's your world view and indeed your raison d'etre, there's really no place for good news. If the world's problems were put to rights, what would be the point of the Toronto Star?