Toronto Star: Making it easier to ignore the poor

[marmar]

We hear a great deal about the lives of the rich, much of it sympathetic and often fawning.

Even Conrad Black, despite his history of anti-Canadian outbursts, is treated almost fondly by commentators who generally have a hard-hearted, tough-on-crime attitude toward less well-heeled felons.

The poor rarely get such sympathetic attention; indeed they rarely get much attention at all. And they’re soon to get even less.

That is the real reason for the Harper government’s decision to scrap the long-form census matters, and why the debate over it is more than a bizarre obsession with statistics in this overheated summer.

As a number of experts have noted, the decision to replace the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary abbreviated survey will result in less reliable data collection, particularly from the poor and marginalized.

....(snip)....

Neo-conservative economic policies — notably, tax cuts for the rich, austerity for the rest — are intuitively unappealing to most Canadians, who tend to believe in fairness, social inclusion and equal opportunity.

But if Canadians are unaware of the extent of poverty, they won’t be concerned about policies that fail to address the problem. Indeed, they’ll be under the impression the problem is being addressed. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/840510

[applegrove]

1. And Harper and company are building more prisons even though the crime rate has gone down

lately. Is that another sign that Harper and gang expect there to be more poverty (which crime follows...look at mexico). We've worked hard to try and do away with poverty in this country but neocons (like Mike Harris) seem to like to bash those in poverty.

[leftstreet]

2. K&R

Very interesting article