Hey kids, bow to the statue of Pierre Trudeau as you enter...

I've been trying mighty hard not to write this blog entry. I get the sense that the Canadian public, and more importantly, my readership, is sick to death of politics and would like nothing better than to disengage for a long winter's nap...at least until after New Years'.
My fingers are quivering...quivering...

And most of what I have to say has already been said! Everywhere! So I need to resist the ever-present temptation to weigh in with both hands.

Quivering....

Ah, to hell with it.

My quiverfinger is due to outrage, and that outrage is directed at the Liberals. Their chief communicator, Scott Reid, is known around Ottawa as 'Paul's Pitbull', and he tore a chunk out of Canadian parents the other day. If you haven't been paying attention to the campaign (and honestly, at this point, I don't blame you), here's what happened:

Stephen Harper has promised $1200 a year, paid directly to parents for each child under six years of age, to help offset daycare costs. (He's also pledged tax cuts to businesses to help create daycare spaces for their employees.) Reacting to that, Reid uttered the following on national television:

"Working families need care. They need care that is regulated, safe and secure, and that's what we're building here. Don't give people $25 a day [sic] to blow on beer and popcorn."

Of course, both opposition parties jumped all over that...sheer hypocrisy for the New Democrats, whose daycare plan mirrors that of the Liberals: a national system I've taken to calling our child registry. Martin has since admonished his aide, but given his own remarks, he's not exactly repentant:

"What if 40 years ago, my father, Tommy Douglas and Lester Pearson had said 'We don't need health insurance, we don't need medicare? I tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to give you $25 dollars, and you go shift for yourself."

Well, for one thing, our increasingly bloated and ineffectual health care system probably wouldn't be in this fix, but...what a disingenuous comment.

Andrew Coyne over at the National Post encapsulated my feeling exactly. "This wasn't a gaffe," he wrote. "This is Liberal policy."

Liberal policy is that government is always better. Government can raise your children better than you can; government can handle your money better than you can; government will always choose what's best for each one of us; don't worry, boys and girls, Father Paul is in charge.

It occurs to me that Paul Martin's Liberals see this country as one large day care center. All of us taxpayers are, of course, the infants.

Many professional pundits and even more of us bloggers have already noted this, of course: it is the fundamental difference between the Liberal/NDP model of Canada and the Conservative model, which basically states that individuals should have the choice of how to live their lives and how to spend their money. I'll go further, though, and state something I haven't seen elsewhere:

With that daycare announcement, Martin has probably won himself a majority government.

I hope to God I'm wrong, but I don't think so. I think people in what is always characterized as "vote-rich" Ontario like the idea of Big Daddy government looking out for them. With Father Paul in charge, there's no need to think. Paul Martin tells you he'll spend billions of dollars on a national system and how dare you ask whose pockets that money's coming out of? Bad girl! Wait until your father gets home!

The issue, as so many have noted, boils down to trust. Do you trust yourself to raise your kids? Or do you trust the people who brought you AdScam? According to recent polls, Ontario, it seems, would rather just hand the kids over. I find that almost inexpressibly sad.