From the Globe and Mail:
With great fanfare, the federal government has recently announced an array of legislation aimed at bolstering its law-and-order credentials. It has succeeded in directing considerable public attention and debate toward everything from the enhancement of victims' rights to the end of conditional sentencing, to an increase in police surveillance powers. Yet the timing of these announcements suggests that attention is what the government is aiming for.
If any of these measures were a legislative priority for the Conservatives, they would have been introduced months ago, with a subsequent attempt to push them through the House of Commons. Parliament sat steadily from January through the end of last week, and was by no means overloaded with legislation. Yet the government waited for the final weeks – in some instances the final days – of the spring session. Given the strong possibility of a fall election, many of these bills may never be debated, much less voted upon.
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For the Conservatives, this approach has its advantages. They are able to appear to have an active legislative agenda, and can appeal to their support base. At the same time, they can avoid putting their proposed reforms to the constitutional challenges that some of them would face. Nor are they forced to come up with new crime-related legislation to prove they are tough on crime (and perhaps that their opponents are soft on it); instead, they keep the same issues on the table as if in perpetuity.
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Full story here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/eleventh-hour-gestures/article1191498/
1 comment:
It's called framing, and it's used to control the political agenda. With the incredible ineptness which this government has shown in economic affairs, the increasingly severe recession, and the mean-spiritedness of Harper, the Liberals should have been high in the polls, hammering the government on economic matters, and making Canadians think it is time to throw them out and give a new team a mandate.
Instead, the voters prefer Harper to Ignatieff as the leader of the economy, and almost as many would vote for the Tories now as would vote for the Liberals.
Why? Because the Tories are thinking about how to control the agenda in the public space, and they are successfully doing this in two ways: defining Ignatieff through their framing ads, and laying out a series of new crime policies, spread out over time, which cement their framing of the Tories as being the ones to protect Canadians in their homes and streets, while forcing the Liberals to play Me-Too, and driving a wedge between the three opposition parties.
And what are we and the media now talking about? Harper's failure with the economy?
Fat chance. We are talking about his new crime bills.
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