“There’s actually no plan for early learning and child-care spaces. So it’s a good job they’re putting more money for prisons in the budget, because we’re going to need them if we don’t get this early childhood right.” – Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, criticizing the Harper budget.
Carolyn Bennett is scary. There it is. It has now been said in print. For those who have been worried about calling Liberals scary, don’t thank me. Thank the Toronto MP and other Liberals who, now that they have been stripped of power, are sounding scary.
Conservatives have been called scary for years because of certain harsh comments they have made. It’s just a matter of time before the “fair and balanced” members of the media hang the same tail on Liberal donkeys.
When Carolyn Bennett was practising medicine and delivering babies, she would never have said the dumb things she is uttering now, while running for the Liberal leadership. It is scary to think that bright people, given a little ambition and competition, will start to scare the public they are supposed to serve.
While Bennett thinks there are votes to be harvested in portraying the Conservatives as wrong-headed on crime, her rhetoric makes her look foolish and scary. But she is in good company.
Irwin Cotler is a Montreal MP. The former justice minister is now the Liberal justice critic. A law professor and human rights advocate, Cotler is respected by fellow academics. Many of them think he has been slumming it by being involved in active politics. Cotler was another in the long list of justice ministers whom judges admire and families of crime victims never could and never will. All of that may have been scary to those of us who have written for years about the need to get serious about crime. The Harper budget prompted Mr. Cotler to sound like his melon had been bruised by being somewhere he never dreamed of being, in opposition.
One of his complaints about the budget was that there was too much money in it for jails and not enough for soccer fields. Everyone understands the standard Liberal argument. You have to spend more on the front end to get at those root causes for crime. If you spend more on prevention, the front end, you won’t have to spend as much on the back end, jail.
While everyone can understand what he is saying, reality makes his comment sound positively nutty. You cannot read this newspaper on a daily basis and not notice that many of the crimes making the front pages are being committed by people who are either out on parole or served very little time for serious crimes in the recent past. Was it a mistake to send these criminals to jail in the first place? Should we have just gotten them involved in some organized soccer?
“Hey, Bubba, I should be sending you to jail for life for breaking into the old lady’s home, raping and torturing and bludgeoning her to death. But I don’t think jail will rehabilitate you. So we passed the hat around earlier today, and some of my fellow judges and defence lawyers bought you this soccer outfit. You get shoes, short pants, and a jersey with the letters L I F E on the back. That represents the sentence you should be getting. But on this day we are living in Cotlerworld.”
With inspiration from the writers of Boston Legal, we will sum it up this way.
The last name is Adler. The first name is Charles. Liberals are scary. Over and out.
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