I got this email from Public Interst Alberta which has been lobbying for better child care in Alberta. Thought I would print the whole thing as it raises serious criticisms of Harpers Made In Alberta Day Care Plan.
The Conservative Party of Canada released their plan for Childcare
yesterday. The main focus of the Conservative Party plan is to give families
$100 per month for every child under the age of 6 ($2.4 billion annually)
regardless of income and allow them to "choose" their own childcare
preferences.
The media called on Public Interest Alberta to respond to this new plan. In
particular, I did a CBC Television Interview (in English and French that ran
province wide) and an interview in the Calgary Herald and the Edmonton
Journal (see article).
It is very important that people who care about this important public
interest issues use the election to participate in phone in shows and write
letters to the editor of your local new papers. Here are some points that
are important when looking at this issue.
* Families will not have a real choice for childcare and early
childhood education options unless there is an affordable, accessible and
high quality childcare system in place.
* Giving all parents money directly as a policy to build a childcare
system is the same as giving money to everyone who owns a car and expecting
that will build a road system.
* The tax incentives for corporations to start new childcare centres
will not work. This was tried by the Harris government and it failed because
most businesses are not interested in creating childcare centres. They do
however, want their employees to be able to access quality childcare and
expect that their tax dollars will provide this important public service.
* The Conservative plan makes no mention of support for low and
middle income families who are currently getting subsidies other than to say
that the current agreements will end next year. Under Alberta's recently
released 5 point plan to use the federal childcare funds, families are
currently able to receive a subsidy up to $500/month per child ($575 for
infants) (paid directly to the childcare centres) for licensed and
accredited childcare. Presumably the subsidy arrangement for these families
would be replaced by the Conservative plan with this $100/month plan.
* The Conservative party plan does not even mention early childhood
education as an essential element of any childcare system. The current 5
point provincial plan allows families to receive $100/month for early
learning opportunities for pre-school children.
* There is no mention in this plan for enhancing necessary supports
for parents such as exists with Alberta's new parent link centres.
* The Conservative plan does not address the issue of children
between the ages of 6 and 12 who require before and after school care. There
is a real crisis in after school care that needs to be addressed and any
childcare plan must reflect this.
* Quality childcare comes when childcare workers are well trained
and properly paid for the important work they do. The Conservative plan does
not address the need to increase the training and pay childcare workers get
and would not support the current salary and training for childcare workers
announced in Alberta's 5 point plan for childcare.
I hope these points help provide some context to the debate and will
encourage you to speak out on this issue.
Thank you for your support of Public Interest Alberta.
Sincerely,
Bill Moore-Kilgannon
Executive Director
Public Interest Alberta
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
From the Harpers Mouth
quoth-the-harper This is a great article on Harper I highly reccomend it. Couldn't have done a better job on it myself, nice piece of research and political analysis.
Harpers Day Care Plan Redux
For $1200 a year here is the kind of child care Harpers sacred 'Parental Choice' brings. This happened in Ontario where the Harper plan is already in place introduced by Mike Harris.
The 54-year-old woman facing a murder charge for the starvation death of her grandson, Jeffrey Baldwin, was diagnosed with "borderline mental retardation" 35 years ago, court heard yesterday.Elva Bottineau, who was assessed at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in 1970 by psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Mandryk, was described in a report as being of "borderline mentally defective intelligence," and displaying "social immaturity, poor judgment, aggressive tendencies and poor impulse control." Bottineau and Kidman, 53, have pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder of five-year-old Jeffrey, who died of septic shock on Nov. 30, 2002. They have also pleaded not guilty to the unlawful confinement a granddaughter. Despite each having a criminal record for child abuse, the couple was given custody of Jeffrey and his three siblings by the Catholic Children's Aid Society.
Like the Conservatives and Real Women the Catholic Childrens's Aid Society probably adhered to the idea that parenting and child rearing are 'natural', and one needs no training it just comes to you when you have children. Yep ideology trumps reason. Much like Harpers dumb Made in Alberta Child Care plan.
Jeffrey's grandmother assessed in 1970
Had been charged in death of her first baby, court told
Had been charged in death of her first baby, court told
The 54-year-old woman facing a murder charge for the starvation death of her grandson, Jeffrey Baldwin, was diagnosed with "borderline mental retardation" 35 years ago, court heard yesterday.Elva Bottineau, who was assessed at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in 1970 by psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Mandryk, was described in a report as being of "borderline mentally defective intelligence," and displaying "social immaturity, poor judgment, aggressive tendencies and poor impulse control." Bottineau and Kidman, 53, have pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder of five-year-old Jeffrey, who died of septic shock on Nov. 30, 2002. They have also pleaded not guilty to the unlawful confinement a granddaughter. Despite each having a criminal record for child abuse, the couple was given custody of Jeffrey and his three siblings by the Catholic Children's Aid Society.
Like the Conservatives and Real Women the Catholic Childrens's Aid Society probably adhered to the idea that parenting and child rearing are 'natural', and one needs no training it just comes to you when you have children. Yep ideology trumps reason. Much like Harpers dumb Made in Alberta Child Care plan.
The Real Crime In Canada
Is violence against women. Today is Dec. 6 and we remember the massacre of women Engineering students in Montreal by Mark Lapine. And yet in Canada violence against women has not declined, while other forms of violent crime has, including crime linked to drugs. Nurses remember victims of abuse, call for end of violence against women Which makes Harpers get tough on crime announcement on the weekend as misplaced as they get.
"I want to talk about the values of a peaceful, orderly and safe society, and a problem none of the other parties seem to care about -- the problem of crime and the threat it poses to our families and our communities," Harper said at a recreation centre in Burnaby, B.C.
Yep well instead of focusing on the symptoms like drugs or guns, we must look at the culture we live in that continues to allow for domestic violence, sexual assault, violence against women.
"We've got to get to the root causes of crime -- despair, poverty, addiction -- in our communities," Layton said during a campaign stop in Vancouver."That means we've got to put an equal emphasis on the prevention of crime in the first place, as we put on dealing with the results of crime at the end of the day."
Harper would bring in draconian measures that will only lead to a growth in the prison industrial complex, as has occured in the U.S. The Liberals responded after Dec. 6 with tougher gun laws and the billion dollar boondoogle of the Firearms registry, which has not reduced gun crimes but has criminalized gun owners. Nope neither of these approaches will work, until we begin to actually teach about human relationships in our schools.
We can no longer leave this up to the dysfunctional patriarchical families and churches to teach moral and character education on an adhoc basis, or on the basis of patriarchical beliefs that women are the property of their husbands to with as they will. It's time to address the real issues around the crimes against women and children which is the fact that in our society they are still seen as the property of their husbands/fathers, and what happens in the home is not the concern of society.
Such is also the ideology of the Conservatives daycare announcements, that society should not provide early childhood education, rather parents should do this or choose who does it. We don't allow this for children aged 5 and up who HAVE to go to school, nor should we continue to allow it for younger children. We are socially disadvantaging them.
The conservatives disadvantage working mothers, that's a crime, by denying them access to publicly funded and regulated day care. Instead they complain of the Nanny State will funding tax breaks for nannies. Nannies who are from the Phillipines and are exploited in the homes of the rich, because as indentured servants they have no rights, and no one to monitor their working conditions. Again the exploitation of women for the sacred family of patriarchy.
Women are still fired for getting pregnant in some workplaces, including Catholic Schools if they are unwed. And as more women enter the workforce, and remain the primary care givers for children and the elderly, the workplace has yet to meet their needs with onsite daycare. The rare exception, such as the CIBC, gets an innovative workplace award from the Conference Board of Canada, when this should be the norm not the exceptional.
Yes we have crime in society much of it based upon the failure of the nuclear patriarchial family to meet its social obligations, because it is dysfunctional as Wilhem Reich correctly opined. When the right reacts to youth crime, they call for getting tough on hoodlums, tough love. But many of those committing these crimes come from broken homes with little love in the first place. Nor did our social institutions create a home like atmosphere for them, instead shoveling them through agencies and schools until they got expelled from the 'system' with no future.
Such as Mark Lapine who 16 years ago took his frustrations out on women whom he blamed for his low self esteem as a patriarch in training. His upbringing in a single mother family, isolated ,from the community in modern urban Montreal, in his own little world, all this contributed to his madness. Being a patriarch in the making he had no male role model in his own world or in ours. So for his own personal psychological reasons he was going to go out and prove to the world he was a man. And to do so as society around him told him he did it by taking a woman, or in this case women, literally.
His crime was not the gun he used, or his hatred of women, his crime was that of being a patriarch in the making rather than a human being in the making.
His crime was seeking power over others, a crime that politicians, priests and bosses practice everyday.
"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately
with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is
combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can
be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of
"political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all
politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried
over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."
"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."
The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
Lapines crime which so shocked us, is our crime, for society made him the criminal he was as it does all criminals. Locking them away and throwing away the key does not address the real nature or source of crime; the social structure of the authoritarian patriarchical society. It merely reinforces it.
Which is why Harper and the right wing can pass all the laws they want, it will never reduce crime. It is the very reactionary politics that continues to promote the emotional plague that is the social conditioning of patriarchical capitalism.In Quebec today violent crime including violence against women has decreased, in this largely social democratic country, one that has a fully functioning public day care system. In Alberta on the other hand, home of Harper and the most right wing free market government in Canada, violent crime and violence against women is the highest in Canada. That is the real crime.
For Reich, a key question was: Why did people support the Nazis? Reich stated that he found that several things went together in Nazi Germany:
- Strong paternal authority
- Sexual repressiveness
- authoritarian personalities
- reactional political ideologies
Economically the Nazi program was not in the interest of lower middle class people of Germany, but they gave their support to it. Reich asked, What psychological reason could be found that would make the fascist ideology compelling to this group of people?