Anti-Western Bigotry Comes into the Open at the Globe and Mail

To hear what bigots are really thinking, listen to them when they’re talking among themselves.

The Globe’s national columnists and editorialists usually try to keep their anti-Western bigotry under a thin cover. They want you to believe they see Westerners as equal partners in Canada. Of course they don’t believe a word of it, but they want their product to sell across the country.

But when they write columns intended only for fellow Ontarians, they say what they’re really thinking.

John Barber is the Globe’s Toronto columnist. Unlike their national writers, he doesn’t even bother to hide his contempt for the West.

Here’s the headline from his latest column, on the fortunes of the federal Conservatives in Ontario:

The Mask Slips on this Crop of Prairie Preachers

Rarely have Ontarians’ real views been expressed so openly: Westerners are nothing but foreigners who don’t really belong at the center of things.

That’s exactly how Barber puts it:

To be an Ontarian through every stage of the Alberta crusade is to understand what it must have been like for the original inhabitants of these shores to encounter the Récollet “Black Robes” more than 300 years ago. Their arrogance was so stunning as to be almost quaint.

That’s right. That’s what Ontarians really think of the West. It’s what they say when they’re talking to themselves.

To Ontarians, Westerners are nothing but unwelcome foreign invaders, a bunch of visiting missionaries with alien beliefs. So goes the stereotype from Ontario. So goes its anti-Western bigotry.

The column is a hatchet review of Westerners’ attempts to be heard in Ontario. It’s all been a waste of time, concludes the Globe’s Toronto columnist, because Ontario will never vote for the stupid rubes from the West:

Exactly the same thing has already happened four times before to this same group in different guises: in the elections of 1993 and 1997, when urban Ontario first rejected the Reform Party so decisively; in 2000, when it repeated the lesson for the benefit of the Canadian Alliance; and in 2004, when the amalgamated Conservative Party failed again to reoccupy the terrain that once welcomed Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives.

It’s all been a waste of time, because Ontario will never give up its view of Westerners as stupid foreigners. Writes Barber:

Just as an earlier breed of Prairie evangelists streamed east preaching the social gospel … their legacy will likewise be limited — an undigested lump of regional grievance in the national craw, never a government.

He’s an open bigot, but Barber is right in one sense. It really has been a waste of time. The idea of Canada as an equal partnership is a fraud. The claim that all Canadians are equal is a lie. Ontarians will never see Westerners as equal Canadians.