It’s too bad that the Conservatives are so obstinately determined to not offer a credible alternative to gov’t by the still-slowly-imploding Liberal party. The Conservatives have been characterized by petulance, resentment and ideologically-driven ill-humour since being split into the Progressive Conservative, Reform, and BQ parties… which only grew worse under Harper and Joe Who.
You might think that – having reunited two-thirds of the party and won a minority gov’t – they’d be able to drop the bad attitude, grow up, and show the country what it had be missing by allowing the Liberals to govern by corrupt, insider-baseball means.
Nope. They may have dropped the oft-mocked “Canada’s New Gov’t” previous slapped on everything remotely connected to the government, no matter how far removed from the political fora, but they’re still stuck in an ideological rut with a bad attitude and a determination to put the boots in to anyone on the wrong side of their self-declared culture war.
The latest target: Vancouver’s successful safe-injection site.
[quote=“Globe and Mail”]Ottawa is determined to shut down Vancouver’s safe-injection site because it’s necessary to “draw a line” about which public health measures are acceptable, Canada’s Health Minister says.
Tony Clement said that while the government supports needle exchanges as a legitimate intervention, providing a site to facilitate the injection of illegal drugs is going too far. He also invoked the slippery-slope argument.
“There are already people saying injection sites aren’t enough, that true harm reduction is giving out heroin for free,” the minister said.
“You have to draw the line somewhere and we feel we’re drawing the line in a place Canadians are comfortable,” Mr. Clement said in an interview in Mexico City, where he is attending the 17th International AIDS Conference.[/quote]
So the Conservatives are going to ““draw a line” about which public health measures are acceptable”? Why not draw a line around public health measures that are effective? The safe-injection site is surely a blemish on the city’s reputation… high-lighting as it does, the need for such… but compared to the chaos and squalor of the downtown eastside, it’s a positive beacon.
It pisses me off to no end that corruption and ideologically-driven idiocy enjoy as much latitude as they do in Canadian politics because there are no credible alternatives. Pretty pathetic that the best hope for the next election is another minority parliament… more seats (gag!) for the the separatist BQ (which consistently comes up with the most intelligent and innovative programs, as well as the most asinine identity-politics driven-hogwash) and maybe a huge surge for the never-yet-elected Green party.
Ottawa’s the world’s coldest capital city, and yet still better than this crop deserves.