The Torontoist noticed the bizarrely vitriolic tone of the online commenters at major Toronto news websites during the five-week-old civic strike and collected a possibly representative sample (although one might hope they were wildly sensationalizing).
It's not just you, Random Internet Guy.
Commenters at the sites of the CBC, Star, Post, Globe, Sun, and CP24 all engaged in frantic debate about the possible resolution of the Toronto city workers' strike. By "frantic debate," we of course mean "endless name-calling, mostly anti-union."
To be fair, there was a small and devoted minority of CUPE supporters, some of whom were involved in a devoted round of nose-thumbing at their ideological foes. They were, however, outnumbered at least twenty-to-one by the howling monkey brigade that populates the comment section of Toronto's news media sites, who all apparently remember Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 like it was yesterday and cannot understand why David Miller wouldn't do such a thing. (Answer: it would have been completely illegal.)
The comments helped balance out mainstream media coverage that was depressingly even-handed and not insane, which was disappointing after a month of pretty much everybody in the city treating a relatively short garbage strike like it was the Bataan Death March. (Something that the rest of the country has not missed and that, combined with the infamous "Toronto has to call in the Army to deal with snow" incident, has sealed our national reputation as a city of wimps.) After two weeks, Torontoist started looking under the bed regularly for the plague of flesh-eating death rats that were supposed to arrive in the city in waves, tempted by our tasty, tasty garbage. But there were no death rats. Except possibly on the internet.
Because on the internet, not only are there death rats, but... well. There are commenters.