Mayor Rob Ford is seen in the council chambers in Toronto, Ontario Thursday, October 10, 2013 as council selects a candidate to replace Doug Holyday on city council. (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Editorial writers have one job: to find fault. But this is Thanksgiving, so, in that spirit, here are some things for which we are positively grateful:
Democracy: Democracy and the politics that it generates are vital to the steady flow of indignation required to power an editorial board. Without them, the words "shame," "disappointment," "disturbing" and "unacceptable" would fall into disuse. Also: "stealth snowmobile." Democracy provides renewal, with a fresh batch of policy errors, senatorial spending reports and MP gaffes arriving each year, just as surely as spring follows prorogation.
Gas plants: No, really – thank you. We are grateful for gas plants and any similar government power-generation project that is compact enough to be lifted up and moved, semi-completed, from constituency to constituency at massive public expense. There cannot be a more advantageous use, in the view of editorial writers and news photographers looking for potent political imagery, of Canada's precious natural resources.
Cellphones: It certainly would have been a slow summer without a national debate on wireless spectrum.
Charters of Values: What can we say: The codification of national culture by any government is always a fruitful source of material, but when it happens in your own country? Editorial writers usually have to develop a quick expertise in obscure, postrevolutionary states in order to mine this subject. Bravo, we say.
Rob Ford: A more beneficent patron of the editorial page we cannot possibly apprehend. Predictability and complexity are no friends of the editorial writer. Mr. Ford, you are our friend.
Seriously, though: We are grateful to work in a country where freedom of expression is a beloved and protected value, and to have readers so eager to engage us in the important debates of the day. To all of them, and to Canadians everywhere, a healthy and happy Thanksgiving.