Last week, when asked to comment on the recent incident involving an 
armed man near Rideau Hall, the CBC reports that “NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he believes last week’s incident at Rideau Hall — in which a Canadian Armed Forces member allegedly breached the grounds while carrying several firearms — would have ended differently if the suspect had been a person of colour.“
I see two major problems:
- First: the journalist who asked the question was race-baiting. It was a stupid question, designed to get the answer it did. Why not ask if the results would have been worse had he been driving a tank? The reporter clearly lacked the brains to ask a real, sensible question and decided to put cheap sensationalism ahead of getting the facts; and
- Secondly, Mr Singh fell into a too obvious trap … which was also stupid and, I hope, unforgivable.
There are, beyond doubt, serious leadership and discipline problems in some (many?) of Canada’s police forces. I believe that the very existence of police unions is a HUGE part of that problem. Police unions act to protect bad officers ~ and there are always going to be some, just as there are bad soldiers and teachers and politicians and journalists ~ from the sorts of discipline and either retraining or firing that are required to correct violent or racist members.
But a stupid question by a stupid journalist and an equally stupid answer by a politician who is desperate for attention are disgraceful.
Jagmeet Singh needs to seriously reconsider his most recent career 
choice, and the New Democratic Party needs to consider if he is, indeed the right person to succeed e.g. Agnes MacPhail and Jack Layton. There were high hopes for Mr Singh just three years ago, but he was a loser in 2019 and now he just looks desperate … and disgraceful.
