Wednesday, August 30, 2006

On silence

Duncan Cameron takes the Libs to task for both the harm their policies in government did to women, and the current lack of any real discussion about how to right those wrongs:
It took one hour and a half for the word “poverty” to be spoken when all ten Liberal leadership hopefuls debated women's issues in Vancouver last week, as a sideshow to the Liberal parliamentary caucus retreat.

Yet, if you are a lone female parent under 25, you and your family have a better than 90 per cent chance of falling below the low income cut-off line established by Statistics Canada, which itself is afraid to say poverty. If you are a woman on your own, over the age of 65, your expectation of being poor is high, despite claims that poverty for seniors has fallen as a result of the Guaranteed Income Supplement...

In office, the Liberals broke all their Red Book promises about creating child-care spaces, cut transfers for post-secondary education and health care, abolished the national commitment to ensure that no one went without, and then cut back on social housing and unemployment insurance. Today in Vancouver homelessness is a national disgrace and the local authorities are responding by making it a crime.

No Liberal candidate has responded to the issues of our times with anything other than re-worked material from familiar sources.
While the Libs claim to be trying to recapture left-wing voters, it's certainly worth noting their apparent disinterest in offering solutions to so much as undo the damage they did while in office. Which should only offer an opportunity to the one national party which has recognized the need for social investment all along.

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