| OUR TAKE: After some quick fact checking, we were able to find out that the Canadian Teacher's Federation does count Ontario educators among its group. That may not be a shocking realization, but it does make their complaint a bit more intriguing.
The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan has controlling interest in the Toronto Maple Leafs, which are a hockey team in the NHL. They make a lot of money from this entertainment source. The game of hockey has been consistently criticized for "glorifying violence" for as long as it has existed, but even more since the Todd Bertuzzi incident.
"We're asking retailers to be responsible," Emily Noble, president of the Canadian Teachers' Federation, said yesterday. "Yes, they can sell it and make a buck out of this, but is this the kind of marketing that they want to be [doing], selling games that glorify violence?" - Globe & Mail article
So it's not okay to sell games that supposedly glorify violence, but it's okay to take the money generated from another source of entertainment that has the same critcism against it?
"What it does is it encourages kids to target other kids, to be a bully with other kids. This doesn't help us as teachers in the work that we're doing at school. It also targets teachers at the school as well," Ms. Noble said.
And the game of hockey does nothing to encourage these things? You have enforcers within the game that are there primarily as a potentially violent presence from game to game. The game of hockey also features quite a number of players that have specifically targeted the younger, and far more skilled, players in the league with intent to injure.
Our point is very simple. If they want to be genuine in their crusade against video game Bully, then they should forfeit whatever portion of their pension the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team are responsible for. Otherwise, their words are nothing more than hypocritical ravings that are better left ignored. Well, they should be ignored anyways. The hypocrisy portion of it just gives us more of a reason to.
Thanks to Mike Fahey at Kotaku for the heads up on this one, since it's not like I'd ever read the local Toronto papers.
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