Toronto MPP Glen Murray gets into fight over the Holocaust, fails the Internet

There are days when we wonder whether our elected politicians totally missed the rules that the Internet mostly settled on back in the 1990s. How else to explain this, from the Toronto Sun: Toronto-Centre MPP Glen Murray has managed to get into a Twitter-derived fight with a member of his opponent’s election staff over, of all things, the Holocaust.

From the Sun:

Murray, the innovation and research minister and MPP for Toronto Centre, said in a statement he was “appalled” and “stunned and disturbed” by tweets sent out by PC candidate Martin Abell’s campaign boss Jacob Blum on July 24, and made in reference to a Toronto Star letter to the editor critiquing Murray and fellow candidate Bernie Farber’s views on “the shared history of persecution that Jews and gays share.”

“We should stand together, we wrote, to remember those who have perished at the hands of bigotry,” Murray said. “We did not expect this to be controversial.

“But in a letter published in the July 23 issue of the Star, 13 members of the Vaad HaRabbanim of Toronto disagreed. They went so far as to compare being gay during the Holocaust to being a communist during the same period.”

Now, Toronto-area politicians hoping to serve at Queen’s Park could spend an entire news cycle arguing over a terrible time in the history of the last century. Or they could spend some time talking about how municipalities in Ontario are woefully underfunded—this is especially relevant in Toronto, where Queen’s Park still hasn’t reversed many of the decisions made by Mike Harris in the 1990s, despite eight years of Liberal rule. Let’s talk about TTC funding, let’s talk about giving cities a share of the HST, let’s talk about anything other than an argument where, like in Alien vs. Predator, no matter who wins, we all lose. Also: Godwin’s law.

• Grit cabinet minister complains about Tory tweet [Toronto Sun]