On Crime Issue, Facts Don't Matter

With another election approaching, no political party will risk being positioned as soft on crime and we, the media, easily weary of challenging conventional wisdom. Too often, the result is policy sacrificed to politics. For example, this government ignored internal research and superior remedies in favour of the popular yet foolish response of arming border guards. Conservatives are hardly alone in playing for applause. Liberals – as some senior cabinet ministers privately admit – failed to lead a meaningful health-care debate. Instead, they sought and found a winning formula in demonizing successive right-wing challengers as secret agents for two-tier medicine that was thriving then and prospers now. In the priority pecking order, a struggling public health icon tops the ideological tweaking of a justice system that works better than Conservatives want voters to believe. http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/269341 [Proofreader’s note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on October 24, 2007]

Note: http://www.thestar.com/...