Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan skewers the tendency of right-wingers - most recently expressed by the federal minister responsible - to see child care as some kind of bizarre conspiracy:

What deeply distressed these callers was the fear that ECE, sanctioned by the Ontario Ministry of Education, organized by your local school board, conducted by highly qualified staff, was a diabolical plot to do something terrible, unspeakable, to their children’s minds. To steal them away from their families. Some explicitly declared that the purpose was to turn their children into Communists, even though the Soviet Union had dissolved four years earlier. Others insisted that the state intended to brainwash children in any number of unknown ways for malevolent purposes. Though what these could possibly be no one could ever say.

There was no plausible rebuttal to these delusions. This was a matter of deep superstition, not reason or science. This was the very antithesis of commonsense. I wondered how these parents could ever trust the school system, since the same provincial governments and school boards who would offer ECE were responsible for the next 15 years of their kids’ schooling.

But there was no answer, not even an attempt at one. Many Conservatives – including those who seem to win elections in Canada – simply have an irrational hatred of ECE, a delusional certainty that its purpose is evil, and a paranoid fear of its impact on their children.

The consequences of this blind conviction is to severely penalize millions of Canadians desperate for assistance with childcare, with the worst penalties as always being paid by those already struggling to get by, and especially – as always – by the mothers.

- In case there were any points left standing in the usual spin about slashing corporate taxes as a matter of competing with other countries, Erin highlights the fact that the carefully chosen comparison relies on giving full weight to less-developed, new OECD countries rather than looking at economies even remotely similar to Canada's.

- I'll grant that there isn't much directly linking the personal requests about Errol Mendes and Amir Attaran with the federal Cons directly. But particularly given the news from the U.S. showing disturbing coordination between government and private-sector power brokers in attacking dissenting voices (by fraud and/or extortion if necessary), we shouldn't get distracted by the semantic question of who submitted a particular request in pointing out how it fits with the intimidation tactics we've come to expect from the Cons and their allies.

- Finally, some may find the news that some Cons reject any action on climate change based on the belief that it isn't part of God's will. But let's not miss the upside to the Cons holding faith-based beliefs: shouldn't it be possible to encourage them to be equally uninterested in most other areas of policy by asking who they are to try to override the will of a divine being?