Meet the contrasting hot rationality of the Ontario president of the Freedom Party. Bob Metz describes his party's position as rational compared to the emotionalism of his opponents. Then he nails his points home with rapid, wide-ranging discourses on the state of Canadian polity.
"I'm trying to reverse a principle," he says of the party's campaign to change society's way of thinking. "People regard welfare as a right, not a privilege and I'm afraid it's not a right. No one has the right to the earnings of someone else."
"What the government 'owes' the poor," he says, "is the same as it owes the rest of us - protection of our individual rights and I would believe also the recognition the poor are individuals, not members of some big 'class' that is arbitrarily called the poor....
"Beyond that, the only other thing the government really owes is the truth and I don't think the poor are getting the truth about the things that are supposedly helping them. We've got to stop lying to the poor and stop convincing them all these programs we're putting in place to help the poor are in the long term helping them." Metz rhymes off barriers he sees raised against the poor: tariffs that set artificially high prices, minimum wage laws that price some workers out of the market, union monopolies on labor, educational requirements that are too high for the job.
"The ideal way to help the poor is through a private system - charity," he says. "Whether it's non-profit or profit or what form it takes or collective, as long as it's voluntary and as long as peop)e who are supporting it want their money to go to it, that's the best way to do something."
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last updated on April 28, 2002