psvrh
What it it with right wingers and stupid hair?
It’s nice to see private-sector management practices have made their way to the public sector.
Everyone says “run government like a business”, and there’s nothing more “like a business” than scapegoating someone because management failed to follow process.
He didn’t really talk to the nation. He played a role: sunny, shiny, happy, rainbow-painted park benches pride parades, but underneath it’s the same champagne-sipping Laurentian neoliberal wankery.*
I’d say the mask was off with either electoral reform or, and this is my theory, the lightning-fucking-quick move to sell TMX.
(as opposed to the tall-hat, cowboy-cosplaying Calgarian elite that’s the CPC)
The problem is that we’re now forty years into neoliberal orthodoxy. There’s been two or three generations of policymakers, politicians and bureaucrats who cannot even conceive of publicly-funded, publicly-run services and solutions. I’ve been in meetings where this gets suggested and people look at you like you’re pants-on-head crazy for suggesting government just do it, soup to nuts.
Think about it: when was the last, realy, fully-public solution delivered? Not one where the private sector was bribed to do it, not one where the government gave tax breaks, not one where some douchebag got their name on the door.
You have to go back to the 1970s, at least. Anything good, anything we built, was before 1980.
Politicians have had almost 15 years since the drug crisis started in earnest to do something.
What they did was implement a “let’er rip!” non-enforcement strategy that, without supports, housing or healthcare, was basically pouring gasoline on the pre-existing fire. Addicts weren’t going to get help, but they were going to get even fewer speedbumps on the road to letting addiction ruin everything for them and around them.
And politicians did this because choosing not to enforce anything while simultaneously not providing supports was the cheapest option. It required doing even less than they were doing at the time, and it let them get kudos for being so progressive and forward looking.
Jump forward fifteen years or so and the toxic fruits have come to bear.
Clamping down on SCS is just another way to avoid spending money fixing the problem.
Yup, Ron Jr.
He’s actually very progressive, especially given his upbringing.
It’ll work when government spends real money on it.
That means real institutions, not shoestring strip-mall locations with precarious funding. It also means safe-supply. It also means housing. And–this is the hard one for advocates–it means humane incarceration for people for whom support, housing and safe-supply aren’t enough.
All of this comes with a price tag, but we’d rather build a spa parking lot or give Galen Weston money to upgrade his fridges or some such bullshit.