Of COURSE I'm going to comment on this one

From today's Toronto Sun: "Loss of faith in Grits: Study"

As I have been saying for some time now, the way that the Liberal Party of Canada treats people of faith IS DISGUSTING. Though I once supported one of their candidates in the 1997 election, it's unlikely that I could ever do so again, because that Party HATES, truely hates, people of faith. To them, if you are a person of faith, you are to be ridiculed and marginalized, at any and all costs. To them, our opinion is irrelevant... not only is it irrelevant, to them, it's a great big bullzye for them to shoot at relentlessly.

Take, for example, the SSM debate... which was the beginning of the end of supporting the Liberals for people of faith. While many of us understood that accomodation needed to be made via civil unions of something of that nature, the Liberal Party of Canada decided instead to pit one group of Canadians against another, and said it was an all or nothing proposition. They ignored repeated calls for dialouge and compromise, and rammed their agenda down the throats of faith groups.

And the unintended consequences we tried to warn them about are now becoming a reality. What's that, polygamy is right around the corner you say? Can't be true, the Liberals said that would never happen. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the "unintended consequences"...

Either way, Elizabeth Thompson is bang on in this article... THIS LOSS OF SUPPORT IS 100% THIER OWN FAULT.

Loss of faith in Grits: Study
Party's support dips among evangelical Christians
By ELIZABETH THOMPSON, NATIONAL BUREAU
24th September 2009

The Liberal Party was once the most popular political party with Canada's millions of evangelical Christians but has lost much of that support to the Conservatives and the New Democrats, a new study says.

And it is largely its own fault.

"It's depressing as hell," Liberal MP John McKay said. "It shows a voting trend which is not favourable to my party and I think we have some repair work to do."

McKay, who is also an evangelical Christian, said Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is taking the findings of the study seriously and is trying to repair relations with Canada's estimated 3.5-4 million Evangelical Christians.

The study, by Don Hutchinson and Rick Hiemstra of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, tracked the voting patterns of Canada's evangelical Christians from 1996 to 2008. Among the things they found was that there is a lot of difference between the way evangelical Christians vote in the United States and in Canada.

For one, Canada's evangelicals don't vote in a monolithic block for one single party. Secondly, while the most popular party with evangelicals is currently the Conservatives, the second most popular party is the NDP.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

The Liberals used to be a natural home for evangelical Christians, who care about issues such as social justice. In 1996, the Liberals were by far the most popular party with evangelical Christians in every region except the West, where the Reform Party was slightly more popular.

However, those voters began to move away from the Liberals after the party denigrated and marginalized them, the study says.

"Each time Canadians went to the federal polls in 2004, 2006 and 2008, the Liberals only managed to hold on to roughly half of the evangelical voters they had at the previous election," says the report.

"When evangelical voters left, they generally went to the Conservatives and the NDP, in a 2 to 1 ratio."

The fact so many evangelicals turned to the NDP and the Green Party leads the authors to conclude that it wasn't as much the policy positions adopted by the Liberals but the way the Liberals treated evangelical Christians.

In 2006, moral issues were a priority for about 25% of evangelicals when it came to deciding how to vote. The study found 75% cited other issues such as the economy, health care and cleaning up corruption as being the priority.

ELIZABETH.THOMPSON@SUNMEDIA.CA