The Kitchener Conservative considers Judy Sgro’s comments on Tory social policy to be “crap.” Ms. Sgro’s lack of imagination may be the subject of a future post, if someone doesn’t already beat me to it, but for now let me just say that KC’s epithet is more applicable to the publication that she was trying to flog. (If you really want to read it, just remember that you’ll need the Acrobat plug-in.)

I suppose it’s a good thing that this is available electronically, because I hate to think that we kill trees for the express purpose of printing this particular stinker out. Simply put, this is one of the weakest documents the Liberal Party has ever produced, no matter how people might feel about women’s issues.

The document’s page count is 29, though the interior document count is 27. That might strike you as being a moderately-sized report, until you make the following realizations:

• No less than five pages at the beginning consist of introductory pages, each page written by a separate member or sub-group of the Committee. Belinda Stronach’s page is understandable, since she is the chair of the Women’s Caucus, but do we really need the other four? Especially since they all say the same thing, i.e. “read this important report”?
• Seven pages in the back are devoted to the Women’s Caucus directory, essentially listing contact numbers (and appropriate photos) for all the caucus members in the House and Senate. Hey, I’ll agree that a directory is a good idea for a reference source for parliamentarians, but the Liberals are trying to market this as a policy document, not a list of contacts. It doesn’t need to be here.
• Now at this point, if I told you that a blank page separated the introductions from the rest of the report, you’ll realize that I’ve managed to account for half of the document — 15 of 29 pages. Add in a preface that takes four pages, and you’ll realize that of those 29 pages, only 10 — just over a third — comprise the actual report.

And what do those 10 pages say? In a nutshell: reverse the Tory cuts to all women’s programs, including Status of Women Canada. Oh, and a few more programs should be started.

To paraphrase what everyone said to Garth Turner: “That’s IT?!?”

There were so many things that the caucus could have done with this report. Dug up statistics to justify the success of those programs that were under the knife. Explain their activities and how they met their goals. You know — explain what the Chretien / Martin Liberals did for women during their 13 years in office. Because only if you can do that, can you justify with confidence the need to oppose the Tory self-reliance, self-empowerment platform.

I’ll tell you, if 10 pages saying “reverse the Tory cuts” is the best that 42 Librano female brains can come up with, then I really have to wonder about the quality of female candidates the Liberals hope to entice into their ranks.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 18:55 and is filed under Libranos, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.