Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Victory at MotherCorp
JB the CBC Election Blogger has added the Green Party Blog and Blogging Greens to his blog side bar listings. And he wrote about the NDP candiates blogs and a very funny piece on Monte Solbergs blog and his new roommate Chuck Strahls blog. Very funny. All is forgiven JB. Could you remind the PTB that the CBC main election page still has the Green Party lumped in with 'Others'.
Blogging NDP Candidates
Jack doesn't blog, strange that for such a with it guy. Nor does any mysterious unnamed party flack on their website (like with Tory Flog). Nor does Jacks brain trust of Anne, Brad, or Jamie. However there are Blogging NDP Candidates and their blogs are listed here. And while the Tories and Liberals have TV ads the NDP has Radio Ads, rumour has it that Jack is being toured with an Amish Horse and Carriage.
Green Opportunism: The Anti-Sealing Lobby
Green organizer quits over seal hunt opposition
Lori-Ann Martino, who was a candidate in Labrador riding in the 2004 federal election, says she cannot abide the party's opposition to a commercial seal hunt.
Its about demonizing people in favour of animals. its about anthropomorphizing seals and dehumanizing sealers. Its about eco-racism, Inuit sealers are never attacked but Newfoundlanders are, cause they are Irish. The English colonial attitude about the stupid peasant Irish is reflected in the language and attitude of the anti-sealer movement.
I have taken the unpopular position of questioning the whole logic behind the anti-seal hunt protest last sealing season on my Red Between the Lines Blog.
See:
I was influenced by a critical article on Greenpeace that appeared in the Fall 2004 Issue Of Labour/le Travail, The Canadian Labour History Journal, that I reccomend reading: Environmental Justice for Whom? Class, New Social Movements, and the Environment: A Case Study of Greenpeace Canada, 1971-2000 by John-Henry Harter.
It is rare that the left or labour or anyone identified as progressive criticizes the Real Politicks of the Green NGO movement. But here is an excellent article that shows how Greenpeace first aligned with the Sealers, then abandoned them on the ice so to speak by first supporting a limited hunt and then calling on their own for the ending of any hunt. Harter goes on to link this anti-worker attitude to the very nature and structure of Greenpeace and its subsequent attempts in the last few years to bust the union created by its own workers.
While the knee jerk reaction of Canadians and Americans, young and old, left or right, is to end the seal hunt this is neither sound social ecology nor real environmentalism.It is psuedo environmentalism created as a publicity ploy by GreenPeace many years ago to get their name known to the public. And it foucused on the cute cuddly seals while making the sealers into brutal sadistic Nazi like killers.
It all had to do with the success of the PR image they created around the cute big eyed seals. A subliminal image in the eye of the poor seal shows a sealer about to club it.
The success of this PR move led to the split between Paul Watson and Greenpeace, over their moving on to other issues, while Watson wanted to make the seal hunt their main focus. Thus Watson created the Sea Sheperd Society opposed to both Whaling and Sealing. Like Greenpeace he bought a boat and hit the high seas like Captain Ahab, for Paul his Moby Dick was the Whaling industry.
And there is a difference between these two sea marine mammals and their status as endangered species. Which is why focusing on one species that is not endangered perse, over one that is, blurs the lines between rational ecology from animal liberation.
And currently this issue is no longer about rational ecology or even environmentalism it has become a simple Animal Liberation cause celebre on one hand and a quick way to make bucks and get free publicity for Green NGO organizations like the Humane Society of North America. Who launch the same campaign year after year with little intention of changing the seal hunt, but cashing in on donations from the gullible.
The seal hunt in Canada this year was scandal ridden with a falsified news story sensationalizing the hunt in the Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe has retracted an article by a Halifax-based freelancer that described the opening day of the seal hunt. The article, by Halifax-based writer Barbara Stewart, was published Wednesday, and described vividly how on the preceding day "hunters on about 300 boats converged on ice floes, shooting harp seal cubs by the hundreds, as the ice and water turned red."
The story was untrue, a figment of the writers graphic imagination. But it sold to a liberal newspaper conditioned to see the seal hunt as bad. Greenpeace which had begun the campaign jointly with the sealers to reduce the quotas had abandoned them and went on the attack against them. The Seal hunt maybe the issue on the surface but beneath the surface the target has been the workers; the sealers.
This isn't an anti-sealing movement its an Anti-Sealer movement, and those in Newfoundland know it. Which is why Martio in all good conciousness could not continue in the Green Party where an Ontario based leadership made a decision based upon populist politics.
In the ROC we have been so innundated with this anti-sealer propaganda that every year like clockwork the campaigns rollout , the protests begin and the money flows in to the various Green NGO's. If people were so concerned about the sealers fate that money would flow to them to pay them to end the hunt.
During last seasons seal hunt a member of the Board of Wattson's Sea Sheperd Society sayed it was ok to kill sealers to stop the hunt. Dr. Vlasak was an outspoke Animial Rights activist who had already said it was ok to kill scientists who work on lab animals.
Vlasak was barred from entering the United Kingdom after he told a 2003 conference in the United States that he supports assassination of animal researchers as a means of stopping animal-based research.
"If these vivisectors were being targeted for assassination, and call it political assassination or what have you ... strictly from a fear and intimidation factor, that would be an effective tactic," Vlasak said at the time.
In an interview this week with the CBC, Vlasak did not back down from those remarks, and he said he also supported violence against sealers.
"Are these people comparable to people that chop up animals in laboratories just to further their academic careers? Yeah, I think they're all abhorrent in a certain way," he said.
Meanwhile, Vlasak – who did not back down from any of his previous comments about violence – has blasted CBC's coverage of his views.
He said his comments were not comprehensively reported by CBC, and that he was not speaking on behalf of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
"What an unethical breach of journalistic integrity," he wrote in an e-mail message, adding that he had repeatedly described the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as a non-violent organization.
"I didn't expect much from a Newfie, but you have hit a new low for one-sided reporting," Vlasak wrote.
Watson himself was pressured to get rid of Vlasak, but that was not the only incident where violence against sealers was promoted by Watson. RCMP investigate death threats against a sealernd his family posted on the Sea Shepard Blog.
The CBC reported; An April 2 posting on a blog on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's website identified Genge's name, mailing address, phone number and even the name of his wife. The RCMP are investigating the incident.
These are not just aborations from an otherwise socially conscious campaign, they show that the anti-sealing campaigners will stop at nothing to destroy the livilihoods of the sealers. After that you can expect them to pop into your neighbourhood to end the slaughter of inncocence in the meat packing plants.
Or the lobsters in your local resteraunt.
This is not about living with animals, the animal activists around Sea Shepard or PETA have one agenda, them or us. And in this case the them is animals and the us is well us. They want to impose their vegan, not vegetarian but the much more radical dietary restriction, morality on us. And after all if their tactics resemble shock troops, thats cause Adolph was a vegetarian too. One's dietary preferences do not a progressive social movement make.
And their opposition to the seal hunt is purely opportunist now, they will make millions of dollars doing it, funding their lifestyle activism, with little or no concern for the impact they have on the the people and their communities. Whether it is sealers in the Arctic, Norway, Greenland or Newfoundland.
In Watson's case what began as a campaign against the stupidity of Whaling has now become a campaign against fishing. Period. Like globe hopping anti-globaliztion spokespersons, Watson is a one man show, who pops up whereever he thinks an injustice is being done protests, gets busted, makes the news and leaves. With no consideration his actions have on the people or communities he disrupts. This isn't eco activism this is eco protest tourism.
After all as Vlasak said he doesn't much care for Newfies, nor does Greepeace or Paul Watson. They only care about using the seal hunt to publicize themselves to gain more money from the unsuspecting but sympathetic public.
As they go on another mission somewhere else in the world to disrupt another community. This is not eco-activism, this is not the long struggle of working with communities to evolve change. It is animal liberation at the cost of other animals, us. This is simply eco protest tourism. Meanwhile, Watson's protest is over for this year. His ship the Farley Mowat passed by the seal hunt off the northeast coast of Newfoundland before heading to the Grand Banks to protest overfishing. The Farley Mowat has now left Canadian waters and is now sailing to Bermuda.
Lori-Ann Martino, who was a candidate in Labrador riding in the 2004 federal election, says she cannot abide the party's opposition to a commercial seal hunt.
"This is a terrible strategy," said Martino, who feels the Green party is attempting to recruit voters who are morally opposed to the seal hunt but may not be informed about it.
"I have put so much work personally in distancing Newfoundland from that generic, stereotypical view [that] completely overrides the complexity of the issue ... and the economic importance and cultural importance of the hunt," Martino said.
Martino, though, said Green strategists hoping to appeal to new voters devised the initiative.
She said rank-and-file members she consulted did not support the decision.
"There was just such a disconnect between the membership and the leadership. And the Green party was never supposed to be about leaders," Martino said.
Harris said potential economic replacements for the seal hunt could include ecotourism.
Good on ya Martino. Jim Harris has placed the Green Party in the position of taking on a popular yet misguided opposition against Sealers. Martino is right it isn't about cute cuddly seals, thats incidental. Its about oddles and oddles of money that Green NGO's make off the seals so called plight.Its about demonizing people in favour of animals. its about anthropomorphizing seals and dehumanizing sealers. Its about eco-racism, Inuit sealers are never attacked but Newfoundlanders are, cause they are Irish. The English colonial attitude about the stupid peasant Irish is reflected in the language and attitude of the anti-sealer movement.
I have taken the unpopular position of questioning the whole logic behind the anti-seal hunt protest last sealing season on my Red Between the Lines Blog.
See:
I was influenced by a critical article on Greenpeace that appeared in the Fall 2004 Issue Of Labour/le Travail, The Canadian Labour History Journal, that I reccomend reading: Environmental Justice for Whom? Class, New Social Movements, and the Environment: A Case Study of Greenpeace Canada, 1971-2000 by John-Henry Harter.
It is rare that the left or labour or anyone identified as progressive criticizes the Real Politicks of the Green NGO movement. But here is an excellent article that shows how Greenpeace first aligned with the Sealers, then abandoned them on the ice so to speak by first supporting a limited hunt and then calling on their own for the ending of any hunt. Harter goes on to link this anti-worker attitude to the very nature and structure of Greenpeace and its subsequent attempts in the last few years to bust the union created by its own workers.
While the knee jerk reaction of Canadians and Americans, young and old, left or right, is to end the seal hunt this is neither sound social ecology nor real environmentalism.It is psuedo environmentalism created as a publicity ploy by GreenPeace many years ago to get their name known to the public. And it foucused on the cute cuddly seals while making the sealers into brutal sadistic Nazi like killers.
It all had to do with the success of the PR image they created around the cute big eyed seals. A subliminal image in the eye of the poor seal shows a sealer about to club it.
The success of this PR move led to the split between Paul Watson and Greenpeace, over their moving on to other issues, while Watson wanted to make the seal hunt their main focus. Thus Watson created the Sea Sheperd Society opposed to both Whaling and Sealing. Like Greenpeace he bought a boat and hit the high seas like Captain Ahab, for Paul his Moby Dick was the Whaling industry.
And there is a difference between these two sea marine mammals and their status as endangered species. Which is why focusing on one species that is not endangered perse, over one that is, blurs the lines between rational ecology from animal liberation.
And currently this issue is no longer about rational ecology or even environmentalism it has become a simple Animal Liberation cause celebre on one hand and a quick way to make bucks and get free publicity for Green NGO organizations like the Humane Society of North America. Who launch the same campaign year after year with little intention of changing the seal hunt, but cashing in on donations from the gullible.
The seal hunt in Canada this year was scandal ridden with a falsified news story sensationalizing the hunt in the Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe has retracted an article by a Halifax-based freelancer that described the opening day of the seal hunt. The article, by Halifax-based writer Barbara Stewart, was published Wednesday, and described vividly how on the preceding day "hunters on about 300 boats converged on ice floes, shooting harp seal cubs by the hundreds, as the ice and water turned red."
The story was untrue, a figment of the writers graphic imagination. But it sold to a liberal newspaper conditioned to see the seal hunt as bad. Greenpeace which had begun the campaign jointly with the sealers to reduce the quotas had abandoned them and went on the attack against them. The Seal hunt maybe the issue on the surface but beneath the surface the target has been the workers; the sealers.
This isn't an anti-sealing movement its an Anti-Sealer movement, and those in Newfoundland know it. Which is why Martio in all good conciousness could not continue in the Green Party where an Ontario based leadership made a decision based upon populist politics.
In the ROC we have been so innundated with this anti-sealer propaganda that every year like clockwork the campaigns rollout , the protests begin and the money flows in to the various Green NGO's. If people were so concerned about the sealers fate that money would flow to them to pay them to end the hunt.
During last seasons seal hunt a member of the Board of Wattson's Sea Sheperd Society sayed it was ok to kill sealers to stop the hunt. Dr. Vlasak was an outspoke Animial Rights activist who had already said it was ok to kill scientists who work on lab animals.
Vlasak was barred from entering the United Kingdom after he told a 2003 conference in the United States that he supports assassination of animal researchers as a means of stopping animal-based research.
"If these vivisectors were being targeted for assassination, and call it political assassination or what have you ... strictly from a fear and intimidation factor, that would be an effective tactic," Vlasak said at the time.
In an interview this week with the CBC, Vlasak did not back down from those remarks, and he said he also supported violence against sealers.
"Are these people comparable to people that chop up animals in laboratories just to further their academic careers? Yeah, I think they're all abhorrent in a certain way," he said.
Meanwhile, Vlasak – who did not back down from any of his previous comments about violence – has blasted CBC's coverage of his views.
He said his comments were not comprehensively reported by CBC, and that he was not speaking on behalf of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
"What an unethical breach of journalistic integrity," he wrote in an e-mail message, adding that he had repeatedly described the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as a non-violent organization.
"I didn't expect much from a Newfie, but you have hit a new low for one-sided reporting," Vlasak wrote.
Watson himself was pressured to get rid of Vlasak, but that was not the only incident where violence against sealers was promoted by Watson. RCMP investigate death threats against a sealernd his family posted on the Sea Shepard Blog.
The CBC reported; An April 2 posting on a blog on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's website identified Genge's name, mailing address, phone number and even the name of his wife. The RCMP are investigating the incident.
These are not just aborations from an otherwise socially conscious campaign, they show that the anti-sealing campaigners will stop at nothing to destroy the livilihoods of the sealers. After that you can expect them to pop into your neighbourhood to end the slaughter of inncocence in the meat packing plants.
Or the lobsters in your local resteraunt.
This is not about living with animals, the animal activists around Sea Shepard or PETA have one agenda, them or us. And in this case the them is animals and the us is well us. They want to impose their vegan, not vegetarian but the much more radical dietary restriction, morality on us. And after all if their tactics resemble shock troops, thats cause Adolph was a vegetarian too. One's dietary preferences do not a progressive social movement make.
And their opposition to the seal hunt is purely opportunist now, they will make millions of dollars doing it, funding their lifestyle activism, with little or no concern for the impact they have on the the people and their communities. Whether it is sealers in the Arctic, Norway, Greenland or Newfoundland.
In Watson's case what began as a campaign against the stupidity of Whaling has now become a campaign against fishing. Period. Like globe hopping anti-globaliztion spokespersons, Watson is a one man show, who pops up whereever he thinks an injustice is being done protests, gets busted, makes the news and leaves. With no consideration his actions have on the people or communities he disrupts. This isn't eco activism this is eco protest tourism.
After all as Vlasak said he doesn't much care for Newfies, nor does Greepeace or Paul Watson. They only care about using the seal hunt to publicize themselves to gain more money from the unsuspecting but sympathetic public.
As they go on another mission somewhere else in the world to disrupt another community. This is not eco-activism, this is not the long struggle of working with communities to evolve change. It is animal liberation at the cost of other animals, us. This is simply eco protest tourism. Meanwhile, Watson's protest is over for this year. His ship the Farley Mowat passed by the seal hunt off the northeast coast of Newfoundland before heading to the Grand Banks to protest overfishing. The Farley Mowat has now left Canadian waters and is now sailing to Bermuda.
Victory!
Pressure from progressive bloggers and blogging dippers has forced the CTV Election Weblog to add the Green Bloggers to its links! And congrats to them for publishing comments, the other webbieelectionbloggies don't. And congrats to actually publishing a visitor blog article, and a good one at that. And for actually having this. Its unique. They have also been watching the blogosphere for leads and giving credit to the source. Again CTV take the lead in web blogging during this election. Hey Mother Corp there are lessons to be learned here.
And while giving tips o the blog I wanna draw your attention to the great coverage on CPAC. Yesterday they ran a feature background documentary on Day Care/Early Childhood Education in Canada, featuring all sides of the debate. The winners clearly were propenants of publicly funded, regulated daycre. Great documentary very fair and balanced.
And while giving tips o the blog I wanna draw your attention to the great coverage on CPAC. Yesterday they ran a feature background documentary on Day Care/Early Childhood Education in Canada, featuring all sides of the debate. The winners clearly were propenants of publicly funded, regulated daycre. Great documentary very fair and balanced.
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.
Well, it's not your father's Canadian Alliance any more.
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?
Tories offer a big buyoff
Day-care allowance echoes Quebec's statist programs
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?
More MSM Election Weblogs
Albertans Challenge Harpers Day Care Plan
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
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
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?