Conservative MP Gerald Keddy is apologizing for referring to some unemployed Haligonians as "no-good bastards."
Keddy, MP for the Nova Scotia riding of South Shore-St. Margaret's, issued a statement Tuesday saying he was sorry for the "insensitive comments."
"In no way did I mean to offend those who have lost their job due to the global recession, nor did I mean to suggest that anyone who is unemployed is not actively looking for employment," he said.
Keddy's office declined to comment further.
In an interview with a local newspaper, Keddy suggested that farmers in the province need migrant labourers because unemployed Nova Scotians don't want the work.
"All those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can't get work," Tuesday's Chronicle Herald quotes Keddy as saying.
James Morton
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3 comments:
Homeless people can't get work because a lot of them have severe mental health problems and ended up having to live in this streets because mental health services tend to be low-priority. Unless they're young, in which case they probably became homeless to avoid a physically or sexually abusive situation at home. Although if they are young, they probably do have a job. In prostitution.
What offends me here is that Gerald Keddy obviously knows absolutely nothing about homelessness and his apology reflects that. Note that he only apologized to people who lost their homes because of the recession, which can only account for a very small minority of the homeless population since people who lost their jobs can at least try to move in with their parents. MPs are supposed to run a country and they can't even take 5 minutes to have a social worker explain to them how things work in the real world?
Besides, farm operators don't hire migrant workers because Nova Scotians won't do the work. They hire migrant workers because Nova Scotians can't do the work for less than minimum wage.
Many Canadians make similar remarks about the homeless. In this country at the moment, people head out to work on Monday morning wondering if their job is going to be there. In a country like this, no one ought to be put in a position of having to live on the street no matter what their situation is. It is a disgrace and people like Keddy ought to be thankful they have the job they do. Gerald Keddy who has been given the honour of looking after the people of this country needs to resign. He doesn't have respect for people and where there isn't respect for his fellow man, there probably isn't much respect for anything else.
What he should have apologized for is misrepresenting the reality - the seasonal Christmas tree jobs were not advertised and were never actually available to unemployed Nova Scotians - operators went directly to migrant work agencies to staff these positions, which are very short-term, underpaid, and involve residency at the work site. Operators correctly perceived that these working conditions would be unacceptable under normal circumstances, but cover this by blaming the unemployed, people who (again) never had a chance to apply to even these very poor positions.
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