Harper the Statist

Ok I couldn't believe it when I read this editorial but here it is. For a moment I will let you guess where this came from.

Tories offer a big buyoff

Day-care allowance echoes Quebec's statist programs

Well, it's not your father's Canadian Alliance any more.

The Conservative Party's baby bonus -- more precisely, its promised annual $1,200 allowance per child -- is classic state interventionism. It's also a significant upping of the bid in the parties' competition to stake out the family values constituency.

As such, it is the thin end of what could become a ruinously expensive wedge. Society may be prepared to countenance tax breaks for low-income families, but as a general principle, people who have children should pay for them.

Why would anybody expect the state to do so?

The reason, of course, is that Quebec's socialist Parti Quebecois started this madness in 1997, with its so-called $5-a-day day care. Since upped to $7, it proved wildly popular.

Looking for a vote-winner itself last year, the embattled federal Liberal government adopted the idea, pledging $5 billion over five years for national day care.

Frankly, Quebec's experience should have been a salutary warning, rather than an inspiration.

Well contrary to this editorial the Quebec program didn't just pay parents it provided a public regulated non profit day care system for children. It then subsidized these programs at a cost of $5 per day allowing for more affordable access. The creation of public day care spaces is what this ediorial must mean by statist.

That is not what the Harper plan is, not even close, his plan is to give parents $4 a day, with no plan to fund non profit regulated public child care or build more centres.

So to call his plan statist is a bit much. To compare it to the Quebec model is an even greater jump in logic. To say that this isn't your fathers Alliance party, well yes it is, it just isn't yer grandaddies Reform Party of Presto Manning.

To say that people who have children should pay for them contradicts the conservative eulogy of the sacredness of family, and how children are a resource for the future. Thats the contradiction of conservative thinking, on the one hand children are their parents problem on the other they are our future. Which is it?

Well both, but in order to raise children and to have them socially develop not as a resource but as citizens in the commune, err community, then they are a responsibility for all of us. Hence it takes a village, always did, to raise children. Today society is the extended family that replaces the tribe, clan and village. So yes we do have a social responsibility for children. Thats why we have public education and need public regulated day care in the community and in our schools and workplaces.

The editorial, was not from the National Post, scion of the new right, nor from the Calgary Sun or any of the Sun papers. Nope it was from the Calgary Herald today. So anybody still out there think our media is liberal?