| Subject: Langley Advance Editorial |
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Anna^nth
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Date Posted: 21:37:45 02/20/02 Wed
Author Host/IP: 64.114.108.86
Part two, the editor's response:
Make more money
by Bob Groeneveld - editor@langleyadvance.com
After Erin McKay and I sat down and chatted with Lynn Stephens on Friday afternoon, I haven't been able to get one of her comments out of my head: "Well, then, make more money."
Perhaps, as you perused the story of our interview [Poor choices create inequality, Front page], you thought we may have slid that quote out of its context, or that she had meant it to be taken facetiously.
But, alas, no.
She quite clearly said that, if you're not getting as much benefit from the Liberals' tax cuts as your neighbour is, "Well, then, make more money."
Marie "Let them eat cake" Antoinette had nothing on our Lynn, when it came to empathy for the less fortunate.
I even gave her an opportunity, in the spirit of another of her well-turned truisms ("The opportunities are exactly equal"), to clarify her position. I tossed out an intentionally facetious, "So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
To my amazement, she not only agreed, but was apparently unaware that that has been the disdainful battle cry against the rich among those who struggle on behalf of the poor.
So. We're obviously not going to get any struggling for the poor from this government. At least not in Langley.
Women struggling for economic equality will find scant comfort in the words of the minister placed in charge of Women's Equality issues in this province. As far as she's concerned, the battle has been won - or maybe lost - but anyways, it's over, as far as she's concerned.
And then there's her incredible contention that "More women are abused, not oppressed."
I don't know what she was thinking when she said that. I'm not sure that she was thinking at all.
She made the comment after she had discussed her plans for tackling spousal abuse, and I had challenged her on her contention that there was sexual equality. I thought spousal abuse was one of the more blatant proofs of inequality between men and women, I said.
But to B.C.'s Minister of Women's Equality, abuse is not oppression - whatever that has to do with equality, anyway.
I'm not sure she did a lot of thinking during our interview. Lynn Stephens talks and acts like a politician who has been fed her lines from above, and she doesn't really know what she's talking about.
She's a nice person. I always thought that that was precisely why she would never land a cabinet post. I felt pleasantly surprised when I discovered I had been wrong in my predictions for her future.
Now I'm not sure who was wrong, after all: me, or the man who gave her that job.
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