Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson excoriates Canada’s three opposition parties over their rejection of Gwyn Morgan's nomination to the proposed public appointment commission.  He singles out for censure NDP MP Peggy Nash, who berated Mr Morgan for telling an unpopular truth about gang violence in Vancouver and Toronto.

In a speech earlier this year, Mr. Morgan had pointed out that violence afflicts the Jamaican-Canadian community in Toronto and that gangs trouble certain East Asian and Chinese communities in Vancouver.

Finally, after years of deliberately obscure, politically correct language, people all over Toronto last summer began publicly identifying and talking about the violence in the Jamaican-Canadian community. Not all the community, of course, but enough of it so that community leaders themselves and others focused on its problems. After all, if you can't correctly identify the location of a problem, you can't analyze or remedy it.

Mr. Morgan, therefore, repeated what ordinary people, police officers, government officials, social agencies and even the media were saying in Toronto. But, in the blinkered eyes of Ms. Nash, accurate descriptions of problems disqualify someone from public office if they give offence to her and a handful of others.

Ms Nash blamed the violence on spending cuts implemented under former Ontario premier Mike Harris, even though gang activity is centred only in certain ethnic groups.

Mr Simpson thinks the proposed commission a terrible idea, but the “yahoo MPs” were too absorbed in their ideologically driven grandstanding to bother themselves with the merits of the public appointments bureaucracy.

Maybe they're upset about Prime Minister Stephen Harper's increasing lead in the public opinion polls.  They would be right to be concerned about that, but I don't think self-righteous demagoguery is the way to convince the Canadian electorate that they're more fit to govern.

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