Passing gas

As usual, Canada’s joke of a national newspaper — The National Post — manages not only to toss in gratuitous anti-Mexican rhetoric, but to conflate an accident into some kind of conspiracy against Canadians.

The explosion at the Grand Princess Riviera Maya hotel in Playa del Carmen last Sunday was initially laid to a build-up of “swamp gas” — methane.  Kelly McParland, with not even veiled contempt, rejects the initial finding out of hand:

… Mexican “authorities” (the word is in quotes because no one really seems to be in charge of anything in Mexico, except shrugging on camera) are suggesting the blast was triggered by a swamp.

See, they built this resort on a swampy area, and there’s still some swampland near-by, so maybe that’s the reason. Yeah, sounds good to me Manuel … nobody’s to blame, just one of those things. Thank God for that. We wouldn’t want to discover someone in Mexico was actually culpable — that might hurt the tourist business. So better to blame it on the swamp.

Who “Manuel” might be, Ms. McParland never explains… apparently it’s her “pet name” for all Mexicans (who, the rest of the article suggests, are all liars, and out to kill Canadians).

But, that’s the National Post.  Not one to let facts get in the way.  The Spanish owned hotel is not “nearby” some swampland… it’s IN a mangrove forest.  After evacuating the 450 hotel’s guests, and its immediate closure,  the Ministerio Público,  the Secretaría de Desarrollo Urbano y Medio Ambiente and local Protección Civil authorities (those people Ms. McParland says aren’t in charge of anything) took charge of the investigation.  And… as reported in slightly more reliable publications, it certainly seems methane gas buildup (possibly made worse by a sewage leak) was the likely culprit.

If there is a legal culprit — assuming bad environmental decisions from several years ago are any more actionable in Mexico than they are in Canada — the PERSON would be jailed, not having, like Canada, a convenient out the decision makers in an British based legal system “corporation” (a person without a body or soul… basically a vampire).

One has to ask if the Canadian media has editors who do more than “shrug” and evade their job of fact checking.