Left-wing (over)enthusiasts in the province of British Columbia, Canada, are up to their tiresome overused specious tricks and word games again, this time to make you believe that a new law being proposed in British Columbia is designed as an “attack on the poor”. You’ll remember that similarly, those of us who are against changing the definition of marriage, which isn’t an attack on the ancient institution of marriage, by the way, are of course “homophobes” who are “attacking love”.
Rather than help deal with issues of public concern pragmatically, they choose instead to use bigotry and innuendo and class warfare and phony emotional appeals to people’s compassionate side in order to advance their feeble political careers and further what is really at the heart of their efforts, their Fabian socialism and their insatiable quest for political power.
The Safe Streets Act was introduced in the BC legislature last Thursday and hopes to:
Make it an offence to solicit money in a threatening manner, to solicit in groups of two or more or to obstruct the path of a person.
an offence to panhandle within five metres of an automatic bank machine, bus stop, pay phone or public washroom.
an offence to solicit money from vehicles that are stopped or parked, eliminating the market for window-washing squeegee-bums.
The horrors.
While I was unaware that the Vancouver Police chief was bilingual, he accidentally spoke “conservative” the other day on an online radio show when he was imploring Vancouverites to stop their ridiculous habit of encouraging these people. “It’s the business principle of supply and demand. If you continue to give money to people who beg for money on street corners, they’re going to stay there,” he said.
That conservative notion is merely lesson number 958 that the liberal-left failed to learn in life—or perhaps they were simply researching one of their long-held election promises and were high on pot when the lesson was given. I suspect something more sinister.
Vancouver Councillor Peter Ladner, one of the two bright non neo-communists on council, will urge Vancouver city council to join the Safe Streets Coalition, a group of more than 60 municipalities, business associations and community groups which represent over 300,000 individuals and businesses throughout B.C. who back the principles behind the proposed legislation.
Memo to Ladner: Good luck getting an NDP-backed neo-communist dominated city council to agree to anything with business ties even if it does make perfect sense. Throw a labor union or feminist or anti-poverty group or lesbian into the mix, though, and BAM! Instant endorsement!
But with all the support from the grass-roots and community leaders for this initiative, the BC-NDP (the NDP is an extreme-left party) and its leader Carole James come down opposed to it all. And to one of two NDP members of the BC legislature, Jenny Kwan, “This is a public-relations exercise. This bill is cynical,” she said, vowing that she and her sole NDP opposition colleague would vote against it (leader James has no seat currently). “They are going after pedestrians… They are going after beggars. We need to focus in on the real issues of crime and safety.” This from a member of a party that actively supports pot smoking and legalizing pot, and which, given their way, Saddam Hussein would still be chopping limbs off citizens of Iraq for pleasure.
“It plays on the fears of the community”, she said, missing the irony.
Addressing the fears of the community including those of mayors and virtually every police officer from here to Timbuktu is now contrary to NDP policy.
Have the numerous colorfully tattooed street bums with piercings in every orifice so gotten to the NDP that their new position is that bums should trump the rights of normal citizens who are simply trying to go about their business or leisure? Government should no longer address “the fears of the community”? Government should maintain fear within the community and angst amongst its citizens? No wonder they dug Saddam!
Abiding by their credo to always be “progressive” no matter what, the NDP sees it as “progressive” to encourage more street kids and bums. And of course it is progressive but not for the community, just for their cause. Build that core support. Liberalize everything. Avoid at all costs joining anything that to them hints of a move away from their hitherto successful slide toward more and more liberalism and their beloved universal social programs. Avoid anything the reeks of endorsing a move back to taking personal responsibility and a more law and order-like regimen and the traditional Canadian conservative values that, back in the day, built our country—or what we conservatives call the days of “real, actual progress and nation-building”.
The NDP are now so out of touch with the common citizen that they have decided to latch onto the pierced-nipple set for support. To heck with “grass-roots” support—now they aim for pierced-labia support. To heck with the right-wingers like non-union construction workers walking down the street. Now they simply call them “neo-con workers” in a pathetic play on words they don’t understand.
Maybe Carole James and her BC-NDP are completely unaware that municipalities and police forces across the entire nation have been lobbying for more tools to fight aggressive panhandlers and the likes of moronic Freakazoid squeegee kids who wash your car’s windshield, badly, even if it was perfectly sparkly, then tap on your window and “ask” for payment. Or maybe sensible people are just not part of their core support, as I’ve long suspected.
Vancouver Police Inspectors Val Harrison and Bob Rolls said the Act will give police one more tool with a little extra bite in a continuous, multi-pronged effort to maintain public order. Public order is something the NDP seems to be against, in favor of more social programs to appeal to their core support of pot-smokers and Marxists.
The bums that this Act addresses are the likes of those who:
Loiter by quiet bank machines waiting for people to withdraw money, then “ask” for money.
Threaten passersby with needles as they “ask” for money.
Tag immediately behind people as they innocently walk down the street despite repeated refusals—and sometimes just rip money out of their hands.
Actual anecdotal evidence is supplied by police officers and others in the community:
Police Inspector Harrison said one man on the west side drops his pants if people refuse him money.
A squeegee-freak was charged with assault last month after spitting on a driver.
Insp. Bob Rolls said there have also been cases where window-washers have dragged the metal part of their equipment down the side of a car if the driver didn’t give them money.
Some parking lots are adorned with bums who, in an apparent Mafia imitation, offer to “watch your car” for money. One parking-lot owner has had such a person removed from his lot 196 times.
Undaunted by reality, the spokesman for the Marxist wannabe group End Legislated Poverty breathlessly chortled, “This is about sanitizing our streets of people that they do not want visible.”
He says it like it’s a negative.
“It is poor-bashing,” the Marxist wannabe said in an interview, parroting the NDP. “These laws tend to scapegoat the poor for the causes of poverty like the shortage of jobs and the low assistance for people who can’t work.”
BC is an economy which is booming after being thrown in the toilet by the previous socialist NDP government that Jenny Kwan was a part of, and which Marxist wannabe groups like End Legislated Poverty ostensibly support.
It’s a complicated nexus—they support each other because if one falls, they both fall.
Most everyone knows that virtually all these people could get jobs, but then they’d have to go to work like you know like
every
day
, five days a week. And they don’t make a construction helmet that accommodates punk-Mohawk hair, and piercings are usually forbidden. As is blaring music. And there’s no pot-smoking on construction sites—at least not yet as the NDP is not yet in power again in BC. So yes there are problems—but nothing that a dose of reality and sobriety couldn’t fix—as well as less enticing social programs that they and a good percentage of the nation are also addicted to, by design.
But those are the kind of people and that’s the kind of social policy the NDP and much of the liberal-left want to encourage. Rather than side with normal pragmatic taxpaying upright citizens who are conservative when it comes right down to it and who simply want to keep building their communities and nurture their families in a healthy society, they choose instead to side with street bums in order to appear ‘the compassionate ones’ and advance their careers—and maintain their house of cards.
These socialists aren’t community leaders who are looking out for the poor and downtrodden, nor are they advancing our communities. They’re looking out for themselves and their complicated left-wing political nexus. Their very jobs and political parties require a growing and visible supply of victims of all kinds—and panhandlers and street kids will do just fine.
By Joel Johannesen
This editorial is posted at ProudToBeCanadian.ca. Here is the exact link to the editorial:
http://www.proudtobecanadian.ca/threads/showflat.php?Number=1575
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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