rat

Your vile editorial cartoon, characterizing Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe as a rat and as vermin, serves to illustrate exactly why there is a thriving separatist movement in Quebec.

Who can blame them?

P. Spoelstra, Ancaster

* * * * *Your editorial cartoon, showing Jack Layton strangling and caging Gilles Duceppe, was distasteful and irresponsible.

I am an Anglo-Ontarian and do not support the Bloc. But it is a Canadian value to respect a leader who served his people and his cause with integrity. We should also not forget that the Bloc in the last governments supported the interests of all Canadians to protect social programs, civil rights, and peace.

Editorial cartoons are a place for clever mocking of the powerful. This cartoon, and a string of others during the campaign, celebrated power at the expense of the weak or the vanquished. Editorial cartooning is about more than mean-spirited pictures and piling on.

G. Van Harten, Burlington

* * * * *

I am a young, educated, voting adult who is rather insulted by the claims these cartoons make that the new MPs are somehow worse for our government because they are younger.

I am also surprised The Spectator would attempt to make light of the situation by trying to stereotype these accomplished, newly elected MPs as uneducated unprofessional idiots, with no broad interests (in either food or sports), who are incapable of communicating in a formal and professional manner. The young adults of Canada are perfectly able to communicate properly, have much broader food tastes than “chicken strips and chocolate milk” and have no need for a “joint committee on half-pipe.” Obviously all voters (not just young Canadians) elected these new MPs because they felt the older, more experienced MPs were not doing the job right. The Spectator should have more respect for this new generation, or at least wait until several of them have done something worth mocking.

J. Harrison, Hamilton