Comments | canpolitik: Dion losing law-and-order votes

harry_beast in canpolitik

Dion losing law-and-order votes

Mar 06, 2007 12:45

Ontario's Attorney-General has warned Liberal Leader Stephane Dion that his party's justice policies have "very little substance," are a generation out of date and could be potentially fatal for the party in the next federal election ( Read more... )

dion, crime, liberal

Comments 39

macho_ March 6 2007, 20:23:33 UTC

Seems to me the reason the conservatives are "tough on crime" is because they're using it to mean poor people's crime. They're not interested in cracking down on the Enrons and the Conrad Blacks; their crime toughness means busting people who have pot, sweeping the homeless out of sight, and deporting Arabs to face torture in Syria. The Liberals are a little more reluctant to campaign along these lines, but seem to govern in the same way.

ghostwes March 7 2007, 03:12:42 UTC

Maher Arar happened on the Liberal's watch.

However, I don't even want to guess what would have happened to him if it had happened under a Conservative government. Something much, much worse, I suspect.

warrioreowyn March 7 2007, 04:10:19 UTC

He was deported to a country that tortured him when there was no proof of him being guilty of anything! How much worse can you get?

steelcaver March 7 2007, 04:24:12 UTC

Being tortured at home without any evidence of his being guilty of anything.

Thread 26

warrioreowyn March 6 2007, 23:22:00 UTC

Canadians don't have near the same level of fear regarding security - whether it relates to crime, terrorism, or defense policy - that the US does, and trying to campaign on that level will do the Conservatives no good. It's just not one of the big issues here. Harper seems to have gotten a better idea of what Canadians care about, and I think he's going to realize that running a Republican-style campaign that tries to use fearmongering to drive the vote simply won't work.

Not that Canadian politicians don't use scare tactics; it's just that our scare words, rather than being "criminals" and "terrorism" and "Islamofascists", are "two-tier health care", "American-style", and "neoconservative". People are leaning away from the Liberals out of disgust and aggravation, not fear.

Agreed gsyh March 6 2007, 23:43:54 UTC

Remember 1812, when the Americans invaded us? Or the 1970s, with the FLQ mail bombs? Or when the Americans diverted their possibly terrorist filled planes in our directions...?

Jokes and jeers aside, I think we are okay today.

steelcaver March 7 2007, 04:42:31 UTC

In 1812 we were still a British colony and at war with the Americans. Obviously, that's no longer the case, but they did divert planes that might have been full of terrorists to Canadian airspace.

And the mail bombs weren't the worst of the FLQ. They killed one public official and held another hostage. Of course, that was a home-grown threat by people with few or no priors; a more robust border would not have helped us there, and the existing War Measures Act worked just fine when it was needed.

By comparison, we are indeed relatively safe today, and we know it. Our most worrisome threats have proved to be ourselves and our nearest neighbour; security concerns thus are naturally a much lower priority than the more pressing social issues.

thefalsegods March 6 2007, 23:37:12 UTC

I'm sorry, have Canadian crime statistics gone through the roof and nobody notified me?

I didn't know we had a crime problem in this country.

And if we do have a crime problem, what have the conservatives done in the past year to fix this vexing and horrible problem?

It's the same old hackneyed bullshit, and precisely because of that it will resonate well with the voters.

Well gsyh March 7 2007, 02:29:43 UTC

This depends, do you count 'on-the-ice' violence? I don't know if it's possible for /that/ to go up from where it was though with the highsticking eyeball lens thing.

Re: Well binro33 March 7 2007, 02:54:26 UTC

Ha ha!

Re: Well warrioreowyn March 7 2007, 04:12:15 UTC

The only way that would become an issue is if we had too LITTLE on-the-ice violence.

"Honorable member, there have been protests that there are too few hockey fights! What does the government propose to do about this?"

Thread 9

steelcaver March 7 2007, 05:11:24 UTC

At the Federal level, the Liberals have always looked "soft" on crime next to the Conservatives. Since the public keeps handing them successive majorities, interrupted by the odd Conservative-led minority Parliament here and there, it's obvious that the Conservatives aren't scoring many points on that issue ( ... )