Nice pom poms, Gary

The only thing worse than a crappy sportswriter is a crappy sportswriter who actually thinks he can write the news. Former Vancouver Sun jocksniffer Gary Mason has been a political writer at the Globe and Mail for some time now, but disingenuous pandering like today's "Abbott refreshingly candid about private health care" (BC Edition, Page S3) proves that Mason may have changed his game, but he's still not that good at it.

Mason repeatedly treats the BC Liberals like the "home team", believing that he gets better access if he puts the hard questions away. His piece on the BC Health Minister's love of health care profiteering reads like the sycophantic post-game tete a tetes he used to have with Markus Naslund . In fact, Mason allows the minister to claim that the 2004 strike by members of the Hospital Employees Union was a positive in that it allowed the Health Ministry to experiment with contracting out a number of surgeries.

If Mason were an actual journalist, he would have pointed out that the Liberals started the whole mess when Gordon Campbell ripped up HEU's collective agreement (which he explicitly promised not to four years earlier), rammed Bill 29 through the Legislature (which would have, among other abuses, forced HEU members who were fired under the same legislation to rebate their salaries), and almost pushed BC into a General Strike. Intimidation does not equal innovation, but tell that to someone who made his living sucking up to the likes of Donald Brashear and Todd Bertuzzi.

Mason parrots the Minister's harrumph that too much emotion resides within the debate about the fate of B.C.'s health care system. Unfortunately, Abbott and Mason don't apply the same argument every time Carole Taylor whines hysterically that Health Care is taking up an increasing share of the province's budget, and soon there will be nothing left. Health Care does take up a bigger piece of the pie, but only because the pie shrinks every time the Liberals forgo vital revenue in order to dish out tax cuts to their rich friends. Never let the facts get in the way of a good fear-mongering.

There are good sportswriters at the Globe and Mail, particularly Stephen Brunt and Eric Duhatschek. Don't count Mason among them, because even the die-hard fans need a little objectivity.