Fire Gerry Ritz

What the hell is wrong with Stephen Harper? Does he just not give a damn? How fucking arrogant is this asshole? His Agriculture Minister, Gerry Ritz, apparently doesn't take his job very seriously. The Department of Agriculture is also responsible for Agri-foods, and is the department that oversees the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. For anybody who hasn't noticed, a Listeria outbreak has swept through Canada, due to tainted meats from a Maple Leaf Foods facility. In the midst of this mess, we have Conservatives preaching the ludicrous idea that the best course of action is less Government supervision. For a government so big on law and order, they have to be smoking something pretty potent to make that position seem even remotely logical, and I'm pretty sure that whatever it is, it's not legal.

In the middle of this outbreak, while the body count has been rising, Gerry Ritz, the Minister who bears responsibility for this pathetic failure on the part of Government to protect the public, decided that doing nothing was just not an option. So, he cracked a joke and said that this whole situation was a death by a thousand cuts. Then he corrected himself and said "cold cuts." People are DYING, and Mr. Ritz's course of action was to crack a joke? The only joke here is the fact that he was appointed in the first place.

It begs a question though: what is going on with Stephen Harper's leadership? Let's look at his Cabinet choices: David Emerson, defector, and second biggest asshole in Canada (a very close second to the Prime Minister). Then we have Josee Verner, who on a trip to Mexico, in the middle of the Brenda Martin mess, decided to skip out on visiting this wrongfully imprisoned Canadian citizen who was on suicide watch, so that she could attend a party. Maxime Bernier, the man whose girlfriend had ties to the mafia and biker gangs, and placed her on a list that would have entitled her, should she have asked, to receive a diplomatic passport. Oh, and let's not forget that apparently the RCMP raised red flags about her, but nobody in the government gave a damn, because M. Bernier was Harper's golden boy in Quebec. We had Gordon O'Connor, the defense lobbyist who didn't understand that the job of the Minister of Defense is to run the Department, not to be a General, and interfering in command decisions. Joining the club now is Gerry Ritz. Is the Tory bench so lacking in depth that Harper can't fire these idiots and hire people who aren't national embarrassments? There should have been no question here: Gerry Ritz should have tendered his resignation, and if he wasn't going to, the Prime Minister should have demanded it. The fact that he didn't proves one thing: that Stephen Harper doesn't care about the victims of this outbreak. He has proved it by trying to further weaken the CFIA in spite of this catastrophe. He has further proved it by refusing to fire the point man for this disaster, even after that Minister made callous jokes before some of the dead have even been buried. Shameful.