McParland can't get beyond his personal dislike of Liberals generally, and Trudeau personally, his columns are almost always rants rather than analysis. I actually was thinking of just that Kardashian comparison when I wrote above that his columns "often veer unintentionally into Onion-like satire". There was a column he wrote during the campaign, "How I Came to Admire Justine Trudeau", which was so full of non-sequiturs and asinine comparisons that I could help but picture poor Kelly foaming at the mouth, raging against reality. There are a lot of substantive criticisms which one could direct at the Liberal campaign and platform, but his column completely missed every target.
My favourite McParland column was much earlier in his career, when Miller was still mayor. He wrote about how he had driven from Union Station to Yonge and Bloor after lunch one weekday, and complained about how long it had taken him to drive and park. And he blamed Miller for it. Putting aside for a moment whether any rational person would expect to be able to get between those two locations midday on a weekday in a car with any reliable degree of speed, there seemed to be no rationale connection between congestion in downtown Toronto on a weekday (a sign of a thriving city) and what Miller had done or had failed to do to help single-occupant cars trying to travel in an area where everyone knows that the subway, walking or even a cab would be faster. It was brilliantly hilarious in its complete lack of logic. The Jarvis bike lanes were still a proposal at the time, and (although I do not recall him mentioning the bike lanes by name) there did seem to be some implication that the proposed changes to Jarvis (and the mayor's support for cycling infrastructure generally) were part of Miller's alleged failure, although he couldn't quite seem to explain what Miller had already done that had delayed him.
Then it occurred to me. You know the comments sections at the bottom of online newspaper articles, how regardless of the article topic there will always be some trolls who want to grind their political axes and blame the problem on whomever it is they dislike. So the article could be about, say, the fire department rescuing a cat from a tree, and these losers/trolls will come out to blame the standed cat on McGuinty/Wynne/Harper/Tory/Trudeau/etc. There doesn't need to be a connection, or even any logic - they just want to rant. It's upon reading McParland's column about how Miller had ruined his drive from Union Station to Yonge and Bloor that I realized that McParland is one of those trolls/losers who somehow has gotten his own column! It really helps to understand the crap that McParland produces when one appreciates that simple fact.
I have no issue with right-wing columnists (some of my favourite political commentators in Canada veer right), but I have no patience for hacks. And McParland is a hack.
.
