Rankandfile.ca readers have voted!
After last year’s prairie sweep of scumbags Jason Kenney and Scott Banda, Rankandfile.ca readers have voted for two Ontario turds. We’ve also saved some space for two important Dishonourable Mentions: meatpacking multinational Cargill, and Alberta Minister of Health Tyler Shandro.
Mike Harris
Private Sector Scumbag of the Year
Proving Rankandfile.ca readers have long memories, the one and only Mike Harris won the Private Sector Scumbag of the Year award for his role as chair of the Board of Directors for Chartwell, one of Canada’s notorious nursing home profiteers. Harris, the former Premier of Ontario, helped wreck the province’s healthcare system with cuts, while opening the door to privatization and profiteering, especially in long-term care and home care. Now the scumbag is cashing in on the cost-cutting, poverty-wage LTC system he helped build. Meanwhile, Chartwell is collecting millions in federal government wage subsidies while paying out dividends to shareholders. Harris is a great reminder that elites don’t hate welfare and wealth redistribution. They just hate it when it helps working and poor people.
Stephen Lecce
Public Sector Scumbag of the Year
Ontario’s private school weasel Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, has upset Tyler Shandro (see entry below) to win this year’s Public Sector Scumbag of the Year. Lecce started 2020 at war with Ontario’s educators for the sake of protecting the low-tax utopia for Ontario’s wealthy and business owners. After the first Covid wave, the boy Minister who never had a real job, decided to pay some American corporate consultants a fat seven figures to draw up a September school reopening plan. Of course, the plan these grifters produced dissolved on contact with reality. In the fine tradition of countless St. Michael’s College grads, Lecce bumbled his way through with little consequence, solving his problems by rigging the system and throwing everyone else to the wolves. He’s made sure Covid testing regimes in schools are a joke, and he’s scrapped seniority hiring rules for teachers so favouritism can run rampant.
Tyler Shandro
Dishonourable Mention
Alberta’s Minister of Health is such a loser he couldn’t even win Scumbag of the Year. Shandro’s list of crimes are well-known at this point. As the second wave gathered steam in October, the scumbag announced 11,000 job cuts in Alberta’s healthcare system. This came after Shandro and the UCP gang pushed through legislation to advance healthcare privatization and profiteering, and build a bigger two-tier healthcare system to serve the wealthy. And he’s not just a Yes Man. This guy is running a private health company on the side with his wife. If you call him out on it, he may show up at your house to have words. Shandro’s deranged personal behaviour is consistent with his political disregard for human life. If confronted by Shandro, you have the right to defend yourself – just as thousands of AUPE members did in October with their brave wildcat strike. Watch for this skidmark in 2021. He’s bound to make a run for Scumbag of the Year again – unless his career is cut short by concerted job action from Alberta’s working majority.
Cargill
Dishonourable Mention
Back in April, this American corporation’s disgusting conditions for workers and animals led to the single largest Covid outbreak in Canada at the High River, Alberta meatpacking plant. At least three people died as a result, including two workers and the elderly father of a worker. Nearly a thousand workers were infected, and at least 1,500 total cases of linked to the plant. There’s also an outbreak at the Cargill poultry plant in Guelph, Ontario with 143 confirmed cases. And it’s not just Canada. Cargill’s operations in the United States have been even worse. Naturally, the Alberta, Ontario and federal governments have done absolutely nothing to punish Cargill. In fact, one group of Canadian elites who run the Globe & Mail saw fit to name Cargill as one of Canada’s Top 100 employers. The open collusion and support of Canadian elites for Cargill’s crimes is a cruel reminder why we continue to fight for justice and freedom from the forces of organized money.