Saturday front page smackdown

Not a bad pair of A1's this weekend. The Star does what the Star does well, a what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-our-institutions investigative piece on the high cost and total uselessness of (some) workers' comp-funded retraining programs. The Globe does what the Globe does well, sending someone to Niger to look into the mysterious abduction of a top Canadian diplomat.

The Globe wins this one on points, I think. Everyone already knows that our workers' comp system is a black hole of waste and mismanagement: it has ever been thus. And the focus of the piece is rather narrow, even lazy: just a few case studies of people who were sent by expensive consultants [!] to expensive private training centres, and still can't speak English. Time was when any workers comp piece worth its salt included the phrase 'billions unaccounted for', or 'skyrocketing deficit' or 'nightmare of red tape as benefits delayed for maimed thousands'. Kafka worked in workers comp, ya know.

The real story here is the general lack of adequate ESL services in this province, which has been causing massive inefficiencies and suffering for decades. It's a real mystery why -- and a scandal that -- no government has ever bothered to do anything about it: that's the story the Star really needs to write, and didn't here. (There's also a certain amount of bad faith in the writing of the story: they keep harping on the fact that these centres cost more than tuition at our universities, as if a university education were a live alternative for these guys; and they don't acknowledge that a manual labourer who can't do manual labour any more is never going to get a highly paid job again even if he does learn English.)

As for the Globe, well, Top diplomat kidnapped by Tuareg isn't a story you come across very often these days, and their writer covers the possible explanations of the mystery thoroughly and evocatively. Despite the wonderfully John Buchan sound, I fear this is really the sadder story of the two: somehow I don't think they're just fattening him up with turkish delight for the Marrakesh slave market. I don't buy the rumour-mongering in the article about the local rebels having Al-Qaeda connections -- how can you, when people can make careers out of inventing stuff about Al-Qaeda? But it can't be a good sign that they left his car and his cellphone behind. Surely ordinary bandits take everything.