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With Conservative leader Stephen Harper maintaining his odious attack on Liberal Leader Paul Martin over what he says is a Liberal failure to address child pornography, in it’s final week the election campaign has become bogged down in an unsavoury war of words over what Prime Minister Martin has called, “comments (that) were clearly out of line.”
In Thunder Bay, NDP Leader Jack Layton lashed out at Harper.
“There’s been no sense of apology or anything … it shows a real failure of judgment in my view on Mr. Harper’s part, and puts into question the kind of judgment he’d exercise in office.”
“Stephen Harper doesn’t want Canadians to know what he really stands for, so they need to exploit tragedy (the murder of Holly Jones, the ten year old Toronto girl whose killer was sentenced on Friday) in order to divert focus, and it’s not going to work.”
The Montreal Gazette reported that Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Québécois, as telling reporters that the Conservative stance on child pornography was too extreme and would lead to legislative excess.
“It could have the effect of closing the Sistine Chapel in Rome. You know, those little naked angels, they’re just about everywhere in the churches. What do we do with that? That’s [the result of] their infantile reasoning. We don’t want to fall into excessive law and order like the Conservatives often have a tendency of doing,” said Mr. Duceppe.
The Bloc platform calls for minimum, long-term sentences for those convicted of sex crimes against a minor.
Jim Elve, at BlogsCanada, addresses the issue here and here.
Later today, VanRamblings will publish a full election day update.
For insight into Stephen Harper’s policies, as well as important 2004 federal election news events, click on VanRamblings’ full Decision Canada coverage.
You hope….
After the Liberals have run a relentlessly negative campaign the headline writers of the nation are desperate to find Harper doing something negative. Well, pointing out Martin’s failure to pass C-20 and his voting against amendments to that bill is the best they could do.
While I don’t happen to think the Conservative’s ammendments had much merit I also suspect a good number of Canadians have a hard time figuring out the whole argument about “artistic merit” as it relates to child porn.