Stockwell Day tried to hold a press conference yesterday to talk about how great this government’s “Economic Action Plan” is doing, when all those nosy reporters asked him questions he wasn’t comfortable with – like the long-form census (which he’s not budging on), and falling crime rates. Only Day doesn’t believe the crime rates, as “unreported crime rates” are apparently on the rise. Unreported crime rates? An inherent contradiction, right? Apparently not, but the latest data used to construct that data is six years old, so for Day to claim a huge rise in said “unreported” crimes is just as disingenuous as saying that a voluntary household survey can adequately replace the data of the long-form census. Oh, and that six-year-old number was actually not a rising number.
Here’s some video (albeit annotated) of what went down:
Maclean’s helpfully picks apart the illogic of all Day’s arguments here.
The government is also scrapping its stimulus-spending performance reports, which is a “blow for transparency,” according to the PBO. Err, except that they shifted money around from one account to another, and relabelled everything so many times from quarter to quarter that the old reports were useless anyway. But hey – most accountable and transparent government ever, remember?
A Toronto Star editorial questions the so-called era of fiscal restraint when you see the big, expensive announcements the government has spent the summer making.
The government is taking a harder line against war resisters (and I’ll have more on that for xtra.ca, hopefully later today).
Conservative MP Patrick Brown made some observations about Stephen Harper to his local paper, which were soon taken down. Brown apparently called the paper to say that’s not what he said, or that it wasn’t a proper representation of his thoughts. I’m left wondering – was it shoddy journalism (always a possibility), or a gun-shy MP who got a finger wagging because he slipped his muzzle (another very likely possibility). Tough to say.
And QMI gets a look at the infamous footage of Helena Guergis’s Charlottetown airport “meltdown” and finds that – minus the audio – it doesn’t look all that dramatic, or match the letter describing the incident. Mind you, they don’t have footage of the pre-boarding area where her actions apparently should have had her “tazed,” but this pretty much confirms what Peter Mansbridge said.
Why you can trust Xtra
