I can certainly appreciate Leaffan’s position. When you hear promise after promise on this issue and bugger all real progress is made, you tend to be rather cynical about the whole thing. And Leaffan has listened to the gum flapping about this for more years than me I’m sure. I confess I never paid much attention to this issue until my son was born.
Thank you Balduran.
The money is best used by returning it to the families to decide how to use it. Trust me, another Big Government program to institutionalize day care will be slow, wasteful, unionized, prone to strikes, and basically about as worthless as the gun registry. Big government bad: small government good!
I am not affiliated with any party, but please this once can we throw the Liberals out? Pretty please?
The problem of course is that you wind up with a static solution that evolves about as well as any government program. And one that results in a program with an entrenched government department, a resulting muddled idea of how much it actually costs to run the program and new avenues for provincial/federal relations to squabble over jurisdiction.
Perhaps most importantly a specific subsidy gives voters a specific target to fight at election time. You can directly track average costs per child and compare thay to the program. Drive the subsidy to $2000 per child if $1200 is measurably too low. Politicians then have to address a specific need instead of a vauge “increase funding to meet the needs of a new century” campaign promises you always hear about.
There is no such system here, not really.
I do not see any conceivable advantage to this. If the government gives me $1200, I can put Madeline into day care and save $1200. I get $1200 of actual value out of the money. If the government spends $1200 per head on a day care system, I’ll be lucky to get half that much value after they’re done overpaying, hiring bureaucrats, printing expensive business cards, reorganizing a few times a year, sending directors off on paid junkets and just plain losing some of the money. The service that results will probably suck and won’t account for the flexible work hours I need.
I’m not a radical economic conservative, but even I acknowledge that the government is an incredible, almost criminally wasteful way to spend money, and in some departments the wastage is close to a hundred percent. The odds that a government day case system would be in any way as useful as just giving people some of their tax money back to buy day care are about one in a trillion.
What possible advantage could there be in your idea?
I have no children so I have paid very limited attention to this and it probably won’t sway my vote either way. It just matters very little to me. However isn’t what cowgirl suggests how Quebec does it? And isn’t it supposedly the best daycare system in our country?
Of course I could be wrong, like I said not a hot button issue for me personally.
From this CBC article
$7 a day for 365 days is $2555 a year. But the cost is apparently $1.4 billion dollars. At $2555 a child the program could be funding about 550,000 children. There are only 7.5 million people in Quebec but I doubt 7% of the population is in daycare.
It’s amazing how this works eh? When I was a student, the most important issue was education. Now that I’m a parent childcare has become more important. You can certainly see how regional disputes come in. Gun registration, farm subsidies, … are just not issues for me. This is one of the reasons why I think the conservative party is having so much difficulty out here. Many of them seem to expect that we should have the same priorities as westerners.
On a related note, how do you balance your personal needs with what you perceive as the general populace needs? 50/50? Should you only vote in a party that has specific benefits for yourself? For me, the child care issue is not enough to make me go over to the conservatives because of the gay marriage issue. I’m not sure what it would take.
I’m in the same position as Queuing. I’m a student right now and the last thing on my mind right now is child care. It’s a non-starter for me. I’ve read the platforms, I’ve seen the dollar amounts that have been thrown out. But as of right now, it all means nothing to me.
What’s important to me? Environmental issues, student issues, crime, money for the military. Issues where I know friends and family who are affected.
I’d like to point out that here in New York, at a university, my kid’s daycare costs $700+ per month. To look after my kid and up to 7 others we have three or four teachers with a degree in Childhood education, and tons of resources and play stuff. These people are good.
For that same price I could hire an illegal migrant worker to look after my kid 5 days a week, or a legal worker for 3 days.
This fall in Montreal I saw a bunch of kids at a daycare who were having abuse hurled at them by their “teacher”. Two days in a row of this at a park next to where I was staying. $7 a day does not go very far.
$700 a month is pretty typical in most places; around here it’s anywhere from $600 to $1200 a month, depending where you look. The $7-a-day program is the purest hooey; the price has nothing to do with what it really costs.
The gay marriage issue is a non-issue. Harper said he would put it to a free vote in the House of Commons. This is what the House of Commons should be used for in the first place: making legislation instead of throwing everything over the wall to the non-elected Supreme Court.
I’m absolutely convinced that the majority of MPs would vote to maintain gay marriage.
Its been my opinion that it is the responsibility of the government to protect the minority from the majority. Harper’s comment that he’ll put it to a “free vote” to me suggests two things: 1) He plans to repeal the legislation that allows SSM. 2) He doesn’t have the balls to come out and say it. If conservatives wonder why this notion of “hidden agenda” continues to stick to Harper, its actions like this. If he is against SSM and plans to have it repealed, why won’t he just say that?
Personally, I don’t buy the notion of “free vote,” especially on issues such as this. What else is he going to put to a “free vote?” And again, regarding the “hidden agenda,” telling me you’ll put things to a free vote isn’t comforting. He might as well put it to the Magic 8 Ball or a message from God. I won’t vote for a party that would actively discriminate against the LGBTT (homosexuals) community. For Harper to say “free vote” I now need to go through each and ever candidate to see if it would pass or fail. Or I could just vote for the status quo…
I imagine if after a free vote is against SSM then they will do something about it. Probably something along the lines of an equivalence to marriage without using the term marriage. If the vote is for SSM then nothing changes from the way it is now. What is the concern? That Parliament chooses, or that people appointed by one member of Parliament (the PM) choose? The Supreme court should have struck down the current marriage law thus forcing Parliament to deal with the issue. Parliament makes the law, the courts should only interpret it based upon the thought at the time when the law was made.
The first same-sex marriage ruling, as I recall, and a delay built in to allow Parliament to decide on the issue. Parliament didn’t, so the courts took action.
So a system to create second-class citizens? Is that our best-case scenario? Is Harper going to tell us that in advance?
I have no problem with how it had played out. The Supreme Court ruled that our treatment of homosexuals was discriminatory and unconstitutional. It then gave Parliament the opportunity to act on it. In this case, Parliament had made a WRONG law, and the court called them on it. Something the court will have to do again after Harper has his “free vote.”
Because he’s not planning on doing it.
Harper’s move was stupid, but it did have a misguided purpose, which was to mollify his right wing base. Harper knows full well that he’s not going to have a majority government; even if the Liberals and BQ were to collapse for some reason, and Harper were to win a majority, it would be razor thin. There is simply no realistic scenario in which a free vote would go against SSM; if the Conservatives don’t have a majority is would not pass, and if they do then by necessity they’d have to have gotten a lot of socially liberal candidates elected in Ontario and the Maritimes, and they’d vote in favour of SSM anyway.
By calling for a free vote, Harper can hold the vote, watch it lose, and then shrug and say “Welp, I tried!” There’s no possible way he could draft anti-SSM legislation that would pass Supreme Court muster; the Supreme Court’s going to uphold gay rights no matter what the law or the Constitution say, anyway. And if he tried to ram though legislation using the notwithstanding clause, his government will fall.
Harper’s blather here is similar to the endless hinting that Republican Presidents in the USA make about constitutional amendments to ban abortion; it’s just mollifying the base.
What’s puzzling about Harper’s move here is that he seems to have badly, badly misread Eastern opinion. Sam Stone nailed this in one:
Originally posted by Sam Stone
Harper has badly misread a lot of potential swing voters in two ways:
- Harper, or his advisors, clearly wanted to stop the Liberals from using the “Hidden agenda” trick again, so they figured they would come out with a SSM announcement that would please everyone; free vote! How can anyone complain about a free vote, right? Now the Liberals can’t say they’re going to ban SSM. They’re just going to hold a free vote and do what Parliament says! Yippee!
What they badly, badly misread - and I don’t know why, but it sure sounds like there was some groupthink involved here and an unwillingness to actually talk to people who aren’t card-carrying Conservatives - is that this move was interpreted by voters as “They oppose SSM.” The perception of the socially liberal voter is that SSM is now a done deal; the courts have ruled, SSM weddings are taking place, people are married now, it’s a fait accompli. The simple fact is that SSM has been a reality for some time now and it’s not destroying “Traditional” families, so opposition to it is melting away.
There’s no reason to reopen the case unless you want to reverse that. The details - it’s a free vote, not a whipped vote, yadda yadda blah blah blah - don’t matter. What matters is it’s a right the Conservatives are making a move on, and people are reacting defensively towards that.
- They then trotted out this bizarre “let’s get tough on drugs, including pot” stance, which plays about as well with the electorate as John Turner’s ill-conceived “A kitten strangled in every home” platform. Okay, no such platform existed, but that’s about how popular it is.
I have not recently heard any media outlet, newspaper, common citizen or even a frickin’ police chief or police spokesman call for the government to crack down on pot smokers. Meth labs, sure. But almost every sane adult I know thinks it’s kind of stupid that pot is illegal. More to the point, there is a general feeling among a lot of voters that the War on Drugs simply doesn’t work, never has worked, isn’t working now and doesn’t seem terribly important anyway.
It appears that my defence of Harper on the SSM marriage issue is somewhat off base. There was a vote on it in Parliament (see what happens when you spend half your time outside the country working in foreign lands? You end up with foot in mouth disease! :smack: ).
In any case, this seems to be Harper’s stance on the issue:
Harper vows free vote on gay marriage
He says if he loses the vote then he will drop the issue. That doesn’t sound like someone who is radically against SSM. Reading between the lines it looks that he is kowtowing to some of his voting base who are against SSM. He probably figures those who are for it won’t vote for him for this and a myriad of other reasons, so he sees no harm in making noises about it. It is somewhat disappointing. I’d have rather he had left the issue alone especially since public opinion seems to slightly favour SSM at this point.
So, where does that leave me? Well, he has no real way of pushing this agenda forward. If he has a minority government this issue will not arise at all. If he has a majority government and actually does have a free vote on the issue there is a good chance he will loose lose it. And if he does actually manage to win a free vote, and then overcome all the legal hurdles, all that will happen is that gay and lesbians will still be able to have all the benefits (and drawbacks) of marriage only not be able to call it ‘marriage’. All in all very unlikely to happen.
Unfortunately, I’d like to be able to vote for a fiscally conservative, socially neutral to slightly progressive party, but as it doesn’t exist I have to hold my nose for whoever I vote for. One thing is for sure, I won’t vote for the corrupt status quo.
From the article:
“Gun owners warned at the time that the registry was the first step toward confiscation of their guns. Martin’s announcement may be seen as confirmation of their worst fears.”
My brother is Albertan and a pretty hard-core gun nut. He says he and every other gun owner he knows is not very worried about confiscation of their long-guns anymore. Even if there was political will to do it, he says the feds realise it would be next to impossible to accomplish without a dramatic increase in costs. The feds have realised it is best just to let sleeping dogs lie on this particular issue.
Most people even in rural areas don’t have handguns so it’s not much of a worry there.
Now it’s the Liberals chance to shoot themselves in the foot. Idiots. A complete ban on handguns is going to rile up the west something fierce, and it’s not going to play well with swing voters either, in my opinion. It’s also going to re-open the gun registry issue, which is a big loser for the Liberals.
I imagine the thinking is that the west is lost already, and now the Liberals are trying to prevent the loss of any seats in urban areas in the east. And maybe they’re thinking of peeling off some NDP voters. But it’s going to energize the opposition something fierce. Conservatives in Ontario will be that much more motivated to get out the vote. Conservative fundraising will increase. And I’ll bet there are a lot of moderates who vote Liberal because they are afraid of the Conservative social agenda, but who are also sympathetic to gun rights. This may help make the Liberals’ social agenda just as scary.
It simply baffles me how anyone can vote for the Liberals. They clearly have no principles whatsoever. These ideas come out of left field because they’ll grasp at anything that will help them hold onto power.