It was recently said in the media that this federal government is not a government of the left, and it is not a government of the right, but instead it is a government of the deeply stupid. While it would be nice to pass me off as nothing more than a partisan critic, there's far too much truth to these accusations for anyone to ignore any longer.
This is a government that, for reasons known only to them-selves and even then perhaps only to the prime minister, completely ignores the beliefs and opinions of the educated as a means of pursuing their ideologically driven battle to destroy government as we know it.
All of which is done, of course, in the name of increasing consumer or individual choice.
In the six years this government has desperately clung to power, the only consistent hall-mark of policy has been to do the opposite of what the experts in that field would claim as intelligent or productive public policy. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it doesn't take too much effort to recall the long gun registry, long form census and omnibus crime bill.
We all remember the press releases made by police chiefs across Canada who were urging the Harper Conservatives with increasing level of desperation to keep the long gun registry, that the registry was a tool that the police used to monitor gun use and to help apprehend criminals that were using weapons in their crimes.
I'm sure we also remember that the government simply chose to ignore the evidence put before them by these police chiefs, citing instead their own bizarre ideology that this gun registry was somehow impeding the rights of rural Canadians from hunting or defending their property. It was a stunning thing to watch from a distance, that this party that existed mainly to promote a law-and-order type of government was now going out of its way to weaken law enforcement in order to cater to individual rights, rights that in the government's view had to abrogate the right to collective safety in order to be properly enacted.
Since we're on the topic of being the party of law and order, let's have a serious look at Bill C-10, the omnibus crime bill that the Conservatives are intent on shoving down the collective throats of the provinces and judicial system. At a cost of $19 billion a year to properly enforce and house the anticipated increase in prisoners, the omnibus crime bill presents a fantastic amount of spending just to do what everyone agrees is the worst possible idea that could be done. The increase in mandatory minimum sentences for a variety of offences not only contradicts the academic evidence regarding the relative uselessness of such tactics, but it ignores the evidence that we all can see with our own eyes; the experience of the United States and their boundless determination to incarcerate everyone they possibly can.
It didn't work in the United States, and even Texas Republicans have been put on the record saying that they made a mistake pursuing strategies that would vastly increase the prison population. But then, facts aren't for this government, and especially facts that contradict their fanatical need to control everything, or let the individual control that which is beyond the scope of the federal government.
Of course, it would make sense that, eventually, this obsession with destroying facts that contravene the Conservative spin machine would lead to the destruction of the long form census, the main provider of statistical information in Canada.
This past year, the government eliminated the mandatory long form census, which was distributed to households and asked more detailed demographic information than the standard census, which was delivered to all homes. This government cited the idea that the long form was intrusive and then proceeded to ask even more families to fill out a similar form, claiming it was less invasive because those families that received a National Household Survey could simply choose not to fill it in.
Anyone who has ever taken a statistics course can tell you that creating non-random samples like this skews the results of the surveys and that the quality of responses coming from the new census will be much lower than in previous years, hampering the work of the govern-ment, businesses and other non-government entities that rely on census data for their research.
Each of these policy decisions has been met with either derision or outright panic among experts in those particular fields.
While it is important to note that these experts responded negatively to the policies as they were being produced, it's equally important to notice that these policies have had measurable negative effects on the country.
These are not, contrary to the government that presented them, policies that are making Canada stronger or a better nation. They are instead the very same sorts of policies that we have rejected as a nation for decades, and they serve as nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize the destruction of the government as a benevolent body under the pretext of ideological support of the individual over the state.
Trevor Ritchie is a Burnaby resident.
