I Feel Your Pain

Once again, somebody's doing a little muckraking to try and squeeze the NDP vote, and once again, it doesn't appear to be sticking. Last year Jack Layton was accused of abusing Toronto's scarce social housing by living in a co-op apartment building with his wife Olivia Chow and her mother. As it turns out, the allegedly cheap bastard was paying fair market value for their suite, just like this page was when I lived for four years in a co-op apartment complex in Calgary.

This week, Layton is accused of going to a private clinic for surgery sometime during the 1990s. Again, this also makes two of us: I had a wart surreptitiously removed at my GP's office in 1993. Does that make me some kind of a hypocrite every time I go off on saving Medicare? Unlike certain Prime Ministers, Layton isn't trying to cover up his visit to a private clinic, and has a very coherent explanation as to why it happened.

The moral of the story is: if Stephen Harper is being allowed to evolve in six months, then Jack Layton should be allowed to let the anesthesia off a decade ago wear off before anyone judges the NDP position on health care.