Approach to social woes a moral failure by all three main B.C. parties
The truth is, there’s been something cruel and Dickensian about how this city’s homelessness crisis has been handled. Correction, make that colossally mishandled.
You can’t really put the blame on any one politician, either, though the political activists always try. Just about everyone’s culpable in varying degrees since we’ve put up with this public policy failure for years.
More reaction to that study I reported on at the weekend. And I do not know that everyone is culpable: there are quite a few who have opposed the combination of policies that emptied the mental hospitals but failed to provide care in the community, who thought that government support for social housing was essential, and who have argued that dumping all our social problems in one area was misguided at best and downright selfish as well.
No one politician maybe but certainly one political trend in recent years for the whole spectrum to move to the right. So that words like “socialist” here or “liberal” south of the border have become labels to shun. Yes, the Soviet Union failed. No socialism didn’t. Because the system they had in the USSR was only called “socialist”. And we should not be fearful of ideas. We need to be critical, and objective, and we also need politicians who do not shift their ground just to capture a bigger share of the vote. Or who have absolutely no discernible principles at all other than to hold on to power for as long as possible and use it to enrich themselves and their friends.
“Liberal” here of course can mean anything you want it to. But if you can stand it there is a another shorter news item on Rich Coleman’s entirely predictable response. “Liberal” in his case simply means “callous”.
