Gerald Caplan is
not a journalists, nor does he even pretend to be. He is not even, like e.g. the
Globe's Jeffrey Simpson, a regular columnist. He is, and in fairness he and
Globe and Mail present him as, an NDP
partisan and an occasional blogger.
The
Globe, in a recent makeover, got rid of resident 'loony leftie' Rick Salutin and Caplan fills the resulting uninformed, hard left,
party line gap. Pretty much every newspaper tries to present a 'range' of opinion. When the
National Post first published Linda McQuaig was its resident leftie. Even the
Toronto Star tries, within the constraints of the
Atkinson Principles, to present some 'range' of opinion. Caplan is what you get for
range from a newspaper in which the most read section is Report on Business.
I,
personally, rarely read anything Caplan writes, except as a “know your enemy” sort of exercise. I think he is an economic illiterate and I think he is (mostly) wrong on Africa, and always wrong on Canadian politics, too. That being said he 'represents' the views of a very substantial minority of Canadians. It seems pretty clear to me that a lot more Canadians
believe, à la Gerald Caplan and Lawrence Martin, in a gigantic capitalist, George Bush/American conspiracy to destroy Canada than
understand the intersection of economics and politics.
