Childcare Plans: Choice vs. Statism

Macleans reports on the Conservatives’ plans for childcare. Whereas Social Development Minister Ken Dryden wants to create a national system of “regulated centres” (= gov’t run), the Conservatives, led by Edmonton MP Rona Ambrose, want to create a system of vouchers (or direct payments) where individuals can spend the daycare money any way they want:

Ambrose said choosing relatives to provide care is particularly important to many immigrants. “We find this a lot with people from ethnic minorities,” she said. “They want their kids to stay home for the first few years with grandma and grandpa who speak, let’s say, Punjabi. It’s often the children’s only opportunity to learn a language and culture.” She added, though, that the Conservative plan would also try to stimulate creation of daycare centres and spaces — but through business tax breaks, instead of transfers to provinces. “Our basic thrust is to offer capital cost writeoffs and tax incentives so large workplaces and employers will create daycare facilities on-site,” Ambrose said. “It’s an opportunity to work with employers to build infrastructure.”

While indicating the Conservative plan may be more expensive than the Liberals, Ambrose understates the benefits of the Conservative plan. One can joke that gov’t run daycare will be of the same quality as gov’t run postal services, public school, public university, Petrocan, CBC, etc. Moreover, gov’t run daycares will hinder the ability of parents to choose what cultural and religious values get taught at childcare.

To put it into stark terms: there’s no frickin’ way the gov’t would allow children to be “exposed” to religion in its daycares.

Liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill rejected gov’t run public schools because it undermines consent: people must derive their understanding of gov’t and society independently. Government-run daycare is even more statist than what Mill feared.

I’m willing to spend a little more money on a daycare voucher plan to preserve whatever’s left of my freedom.

U.S. & India Sign Major Defense Pact

With all the hand-wringing going on about the Chinese colossus that’s about to conquer the world, Winds of Change provides some balance in its useful analysis on the new US-India defense pact, a 10 year agreement called, “New Framework for the US-India Defense Relationship” (NFDR). It’s an important stepping-stone for US-India relations that promises greater fruit in the future.

Read WoC’s analysis here.

Ignatieff Wants to be PM

Via Adam Daifallah, the Globe and Mail reports that Michael Ignatieff is using his contacts among the various members of Toronto’s ruling class (= Ottawa’s ruling class) to place himself in a strong position to be Canada’s next prime minister. CBC, U of Toronto, Toronto businesses, etc. are all pitching in to help. Read the Glob’s article.

Read here to see how much he’ll contribute to Canada’s culture war and how much (or little) he understands the US, despite (or because of) spending many years at Harvard.

Same Sex Marriage: Lowest Common Denominator

Father Raymond de Souza’s National Post editorial (subscription required, but check here) on what Bill C-38 has achieved is worth reading. As is Andrew Coyne’s and Jonathan Kay’s praise for C-38 (Coyne’s seems not to be posted).

You’re more or less familiar with the arguments on either side of the same-sex marriage debate. De Souza’s argument, however, deserves further attention. Unlike Charles McVety and other opponents of same-sex marriage, De Souza doesn’t rely on predictions on what may or may not occur with same-sex marriage. He avoids the “slippery-slope” argument. However, he also avoids the facile position shared by Coyne and Kay that “everything’s still normal” because the new definition affects only 3% of the population, which wrongly assumes that redefining marriage means simply “broadening” a category.

What the “broadening” argument overlooks is that any category, whether “broad” or “narrow,” is exclusive and its exclusions are based on a principle. Coyne recognizes that the new category too “discriminates,” but says that such discrimination is justifiable but never explains WHY such discrimination is justifiable. Perhaps because the urban liberals behind same-sex marriage oppose broadening it any further (plus neither Coyne nor Kay regard polygamists as a serious challenger to the new hegemony – perhaps they’re right, but that’s still beside the point).

De Souza’s argument deserves attention because he takes the new exclusion principle seriously. As should we, especially since our politics is dominated by the courts, which deal in legal principles.

De Souza observes that the new category reduces marriage to “sex.” The only relationships worth recognizing are those where partners have access to genital and anal areas (nevermind that such access has nothing to do with sex, properly understood). This is an admitedly crude way of formulating it, but what De Souza touches on, perhaps without realizing it, is the perspective of the law.

Proponents of same-sex marriage have argued all along that it’s about “recognizing” gays and lesbians. Their relationships are just as loving (and unloving) as heterosexual relationships. Whatever the truth behind those statements, the fallacy of their argument consists in their failure to recognize that law is too crude an instrument to give them “recognition.” It can coerce people to utter statements they don’t believe (for fear of having a Human Rights Commission busy-body come after them, as happens now) (see here, here, here, here , here, here, here, and here for more commentaries on this issue at thepolitic.com).

However, law cannot recognize a “loving” relationship. It has never asked man-woman marriage partners if they love one another. Up to now, it has only recognized whether they exist in a relationship that takes the form of a procreative relationship (whether they choose to procreate is secondary) because the law is interested in protecting the fruits of that relationship – the safety and security of the couple, and of the children.

But what are the “fruits” of that relationship now? As De Souza indicates, “sex.” It can’t be the safety and security of the couple (or children), since civil unions (or domestic partnerships give them such protection).

Despite C-38 consisting of a culmination of a process that began 30 years ago with the decriminalization of homosexuality (and no-fault divorce), the state is now very much interested in what goes on in the bedrooms of the nation. This doesn’t mean that Mounties are going to start forcing people to experiment in homosexual sex. Rather, as Iain Benson of the Centre for Cultural Renewal testified before the C-38 Parliamentary Committee, this law is about:

“sexual conduct legitimacy� in the public sphere.
…
Here it is critical to understand that we allow differing views of sexual conduct to co-exist. But when the idea of sexual relationships are hidden within the language of marriage – - as they are, there is a risk that what is really at issue- – differing views of human sexuality, are missed.

The attempt to claim THE public definition of marriage is actually an attempt to gain public recognition through law for certain sexual practices and those who affirm them. This is not a legitimate use of law in a free and democratic society.

The removal of restriction on homosexual and lesbian sexual practices was done on the basis that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.� Most people would agree with this. What people object to is that what goes on in the bedroom is now the focus of public conduct, expression and practice seeking public support and affirmation.

Yet… yet, the law is a horribly blunt instrument to secure “recognition.” When marriage is defined as a sex-relationship, what the law recognizes is something bizarre indeed. As Robert Sokolowski argues in response to claims that same-sex marriage is about the state recognizing loving relationships, the state can only recognize the “exchange of sex”:

In a feeble imitation of Platos Crito, I put the phrase into the mouth t)f the laws as they explain to me why my uncle and I cannot get married. Laws are notoriously impersonal and insensitive to the nuances of human emotion, and the crassness of the phrase was meant to suggest that. This is how it would look to the laws, which deal with rights and not personal commitments. It would be impossible, in fact, for the laws to verity whether or not the people who want to get married do have a caring and interpersonal
love, the laws must take their word for it; and if they do so, why should they not take the word of people who have motivations other than sexual for their friendship? Why not let them get married too? Other kinds of relationships can be caring, special and lasting, and the sexual relationship can prove to be quite changeable.

So law is crude. Law is blind. It cannot, by definition, “recognize.” Yet SSM’s Jacobin proponents will continue to insist it does, in the name of “sexual conduct legitimacy,” to the detriment of the public square.

They will attempt to do the impossible, to square a circle. The very definition of “extremism,” despite constant media efforts to paint them as “moderates.”

The consequences to marriage in a practical sense may indeed be what Coyne and Kay and countless other liberals proclaim. However, those consequences are a thin veneer to the shallow core of the new definition which will require a sustained forgetfulness and hypocrisy among people wishing to believe marriage is something more than “exchange of sex.”

Since the new definition imitates the traditional definition of marriage (by preserving the number 2, for instance) and the general social capital that traditional marriage creates, then such enforced hypocrisy will be a dead weight on that social capital. So long as people recognize that they must be hypocrites to celebrate the institution of marriage as the “exchange of sex,” they won’t get too excited about getting married. Coyne’s hopes for using the passage of C-38 getting serious about marriage go by the wayside. That is, of course, if people don’t forget that they must be hypocrites in order to celebrate marriage. They can always forget. Proponents are betting on it when they say, “get on with it.”

If, as I’ve suggested previously, marriage and citizenship are intertwined, then Bill C-38 has shrunk even more our ability to be citizens.

UPDATE: Joe Knippenberg of No Left Turns reminds me that Immanuel Kant referred to marriage as the mutual and exclusive use of genitals. He adds: “If IK is the “highest” expression of liberalism, then SSM is the “natural” working out of liberal principles, which of course doesn’t justify it but rather perhaps shows their ultimate bankruptcy.”

This is news to me…

According to the latest edition of Saturday Night Magazine, Alberta has seized control of the nation.

The magazine attempts to elaborate upon their claim that Alberta economic ascension has led it to become “New Ontario“, challenging for the position of “leading partner of Confederation.”

From what I have gleaned thus far, they seem to be making an argument that Alberta economic influence is overcoming any obstacles it may be encountering politically.

A generation ago, Ontario was an imperturbably Upper Canadian place, deeply mistrustful of radical ideas and populist politics. Today, after more than eight years of the Harris Tories, Ontario’s politics more closely resemble those of the West. Balanced-budget laws, referendums on tax increases �?? these have a distinctly Alberta feel to them (while neither has proven a constraint on Ontario’s Liberals, the party still had to endorse both to get elected). The West wants in? The West is already here.

While the Common Sense Revolution may have in part been an offshoot of the Klein Revolution, unlike in Alberta, it was not sustained and quickly fell out of favor with voters. In this instance, Alberta’s influence was fleeting at best.

Although Alberta may be doing some things right economically, I look forward to seeing how the magazine manages to reconcile the province’s consistent failure to bring about democratic reform federally or their inability to stop Liberal engineering in areas of social and public policy over the past 30 years. To me, this is not the track record of a province who has become the leading partner of Confederation.

In the meantime, you may be interested in participating in their online poll.

Which phrase best describes Alberta Premier Ralph Klein?

a.Right-wing reactionary
b.Responsible budget-balancer
c.Safety-net slasher
d.Man of the people

I choose e) Faux Conservative Liberal poseur.

Crossposted from Dispatches From The Western Alien Nation

Americans Fight Back Against Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court recently ruled on “eminent domain” and gave the right to municipalities to take property from private landowners and give it to developers who would pay more in taxes. No Left Turns has lots of links detailing and criticizing this decision (see my previous post on the case).

What’s notable is that all the liberal judges were in the majority, with the conservatives in the minority.

Now, Mickey Craig at No Left Turns observes that a developer in New Hampshire wants a town there to invoke its new power to take over the home of Supreme Court judge David Souter:

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter’s home. Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land. The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.” Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans. “This is not a prank” said Clements, “The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.”

Craig calls this “almost funny” presumably because it’s a funny conclusion of a not-so-funny judicial decision. Perhaps he can take comfort in the fact that Clements is teaching Souter a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism: that legislators must live under the laws they create.

More Media Character Assassination of Stephen Harper

Via Neale News, Canadian Press continues to whore itself for the Liberals and for the urban liberals in its latest story on Stephen Harper’s criticism of the Liberal-Bloc-NDP coalition ramming through same-sex marriage.

According to the story:

The Conservative leader called into question the legitimacy of a law that’s expected to pass this week with help from the Bloc Quebecois. “Because it’s being passed with the support of the Bloc, I think it will lack legitimacy with most Canadians,” Harper said.

“The truth is most federalist MPs oppose this.”

Of course, the Liberals and the media have been painting Conservative-Bloc cooperation in April and May as a matter of the Conservatives in bed with the Bloc. However, we all know the rules of the game. You can’t criticize the Liberals for doing the same thing. That would be a no no. And so CP has quotes from the usual suspects feigning outrage that Harper would say something so preposterous.

As for Harper’s claim that “most federalist” MPs oppose it, he seems to be correct, depending on how many of his own caucus oppose it. 99 Conservatives, plus 30 Liberals who oppose SSM (including now Independent Pat O’Brien) = 129 federalist MPs. That leaves 105 Liberals and 19 NDPs plus Independent Carrolyn Parrish = 125 MPs who support SSM. Check out the numbers at marriagevote.ca.

David Koyzis, a political theorist at Redeemer College in Ancaster, Ontario, goes further than Harper and makes suggests some ways that Quebec’s departure would be a boon for what he calls “politcal pluralism” in Canada, which is currently getting choked by radical secularism:

However, thinking as a Christian who strongly believes in the public witness of the christian faith, I am now beginning to wonder whether the presence within Canada of a radically secularized Québec might not constitute a nearly insuperable obstacle to the progress of such a witness. Once an overwhelmingly Catholic province, this changed after 1960 as a result of the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution, which transformed the province virtually overnight, quickly emptying the pews, severely depressing its once high birthrate, ending the church’s hold on much of the province’s life and fuelling the flames of nationalism. Since then Canadians as a whole have been governed the vast majority of time by Quebeckers who are heirs of the Quiet Revolution and who have managed to put their stamp on the culture as a whole. Given that Québec has the second-highest population in Canada, this gives the province considerable clout at the federal level.

Up until recently I have thought it best to accommodate Québec to the extent possible within the current framework of confederation. It is with some sadness that I am coming to conclude that this may not be in the longterm best interest either of Québec itself or of the remainder of the country. If Canada is to have some chance of casting off the stranglehold of official secularism and embracing something like a principled pluralism, then it may have to find its way without la belle province.

Koyzis is on record for opposing separation, so his change of mind – and his reasons for his change of mind – are worth pondering closely.

His comments remind me of one a friend of mine made to me once. He observed that one can understand a great amount about Canadian politics in observing that a large number of its leaders are lapsed Catholics.
Here’s a past post at thepolitic.com on the media’s vilification of Stephen Harper.

UPDATE: Adam Daifallah explains the significance of this story appearing in CP.

Ignatieff Likes US Foreign Policy, Not its Founding

Michael Ignatieff has a long and not terribly original reflection on how the US is the sole supporter of promoting democracy in foreign lands, while lamenting that the US is becoming increasingly religious and thus out of step with more “cosmopolitan” places like Europe and Canada.

His ambivalence stems from his support for democracy building that only the US supports, while other Western nations are becoming increasingly parochial. But he’s not so sure about the moral foundations of US support.

Consider this statement:

Freedom in Germany was an American imperial imposition, from the cashiering of ex-Nazi officials and the expunging of anti-Semitic nonsense from school textbooks to the drafting of a new federal constitution. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroder can still intone that democracy cannot be ”forced upon these societies from the outside.” This is not the only oddity. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German weekly Die Zeit points out, the ‘68-ers now in power in Germany all spent their radical youth denouncing American support for tyrannies around the world: ”Across the Atlantic they shouted: Pinochet! Somoza! Mubarak! Shah Pahlevi! King Faisal! Now it seems as though an American president has finally heard their complaints. . . . But what is coming out of Germany? . . . Nothing but deafening silence!”

The deafening silence extends beyond Germany. Like Germany, Canada sat out the war in Iraq. Ask the Canadians why they aren’t joining the American crusade to spread democracy, and you get this from their government’s recent foreign-policy review: ”Canadians hold their values dear, but are not keen to see them imposed on others. This is not the Canadian way.” One reason it is not the Canadian way is that when American presidents speak of liberty as God’s plan for mankind, even God-fearing Canadians wonder when God began disclosing his plan to presidents.

Or this statement:

For a complex set of reasons, American democracy has ceased to be the inspiration it was. This is partly because of the religious turn in American conservatism, which awakens incomprehension in the largely secular politics of America’s democratic allies. It is partly because of the chaos of the contested presidential election in 2000, which left the impression, worldwide, that closure had been achieved at the expense of justice. And partly because of the phenomenal influence of money on American elections.

But the differences between America and its democratic allies run deeper than that. When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ”community of democracies” to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson’s dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream.

Ignatieff begins his article by noting the paradox that Thomas Jefferson, apostle of freedom, was a slave owner. He seems to think that the paradox of American gap between ideal and practice is now manifest in the fact that it’s conservatives who support democracy. This is a nasty piece of logic, and an appalling reading of the relationship between Enlightenment and Christianity in the founding. For more intelligent readings on that relationship, consider these books: Ellis Sandoz’s Government of Laws, Mark Noll’s America’s God, and Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert’s Protestantism and the Founding, all of which document the subtle ways that Christianity and Enlightenment supported and transformed each other.

None of these books support Ignatieff’s Manichaean dichotomy of religion VERSUS reason in the US regime.

Moreover, he doesn’t stop to question whether the secularism of Europe and Canada actually contribute to their parochialism. It’s not for nothing that C.S. Lewis said secularization creates “men without chests.” Can secular people be courageous?

Even so, Ignatieff makes a point worth emphasizing when he discusses the use of force in supporting democracy:

The same discomfort with the American project extends to the nation that, in the splendid form of the Marquis de Lafayette, once joined the American fight for freedom. The French used to talk about exporting Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité, but nowadays they don’t seem to mind standing by and watching Iraqi democrats struggling to keep chaos and anarchy at bay.
…
The problem here is that while no one wants imperialism to win, no one in his right mind can want liberty to fail either. If the American project of encouraging freedom fails, there may be no one else available with the resourcefulness and energy, even the self-deception, necessary for the task. Very few countries can achieve and maintain freedom without outside help. Big imperial allies are often necessary to the establishment of liberty. As the Harvard ethicist Arthur Applbaum likes to put it, ”All foundings are forced.” Just remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the British. Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly the Europeans themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home.

Just as the US Founding wouldn’t have succeeded without the help of Lafayette and the French navy, so too do contemporary democratic reform movements need the help of the 101st Airborne.

However, accounts of the US Founding rarely mention the French. So too must American policy-makers remember that however much their help is required, their efforts must be forgotten by those they’re remembering. Take it from someone who lives in Canada: a nation that considers its founding dependent on a foreign power will never think of itself as an independent nation.

Click here for previous posts on Ignatieff’s work (and his relationship with the Liberal Party of Canada).

h/t Civitatensis.

UPDATE: Belmont Club has a post with lots of commentary.

David Warren: Liberals Are the Separatist Party of Ontario

Via Civitatensis, the Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren has it exactly right when he explains what’s wrong with Ontario:

I am speaking to you from a province that truly doesn’t get it. We don’t get that you’ve had enough. We don’t get the degree to which you are tired, not only of the corruption, but of the sheer malice of the Liberal Party. They are getting about equally tired in the West. And according to the polls, we, in Ontario, have decided the Liberal Party must stay, for reasons of “national unity”. In other words, the Liberals have become the separatist party of Ontario.

In other words, the Liberals have set things up with Ontario, so the only way to shake them off is by leaving the country. Canada’s most talented people do that every day; now it becomes the turn of the provinces.

As you perhaps noticed, my analogy was incomplete. Ontario is in some sort of weird old Mormon or Arabian marriage, in which there are several wives. Were it not for the oil dowry that came with Alberta, we would have trouble paying for them all. That Alberta also, increasingly, wants out of the marriage should be no surprise to either of us: there is nothing in it for them, whatever. We just take their money, they get nothing in return, unless you count spousal abuse. The Liberals and our “national” (i.e. the Toronto) media dump all over Alberta. They use the word “Canadian” specifically to exclude them.

Read Warren’s entire editorial.

Then read the commentary at Civitatensis.

Then read thepolitic.com.

The Liberals Violated the Consultative Requirements of Parliament’s Standing Order 78

The procedure used by the Liberals to push through their budget bill is called “time allocation,” which allows them to cut off democratic debate in the House. The rules governing time allocation are in section 78 of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, at the end of Chapter IX.

Standing Order 78 has three parts. The first part, 78(1), says the government may allocate time (i.e. cut off debate) if it receives unanimous consent from the other parties. Obviously, this requires consultation with all the other parties. So does the third part, 78(3), which says that the government can impose time allocation if “an agreement could not be reached under the provisions of sections (1) or (2) of this Standing Order.” In such a case, consultation with all the other parties must occur for the government to ascertain that such an agreement cannot be reached.

Sandwiched between these two parts, both of which require consultation with all parties, is 78(2). That’s the subsection the government used last week. It says that the government can impose time allocation if “a majority of the representatives of the several parties have come to an agreement.” The Liberals teamed up with the Bloc and NDP for a three-to-one majority.

The thing is, they did it in a sneaky way without consulting all the opposition parties. That was the point of the maneuver – to surprise the Conservatives with a quickie vote on the NDP budget.

But clearly, Standing Order 78 as a whole requires consultation with all parties, even if part 78(2) doesn’t say so explicitly. The first and third parts are more obvious in their requirement for inclusive consultation — but so does 78(2), when it’s understood in the context of the Standing Order as a whole.

That’s because Standing Order 78 is clearly designed to be hierarchical, such that a consensus is preferable to a majority and a majority is preferable to unilateral action. If that were not so, there would be no need for the consensus in part 78(1) to be mentioned — the government could just end its consultations as soon as it reached an agreement with a majority of parties. The fact that part 78(1) is included implies that the governing party has an obligation under Standing Order 78 to attempt to reach consensus — which means it has an obligation to consult all parties.

What should the Conservatives do about it? At the earliest opportunity they should raise a point of order with the Speaker to obtain a ruling to clarify the proper use of time allocation. Don’t hold your breath, though, because a look through Hansard shows the reluctance of previous Speakers to limit the Liberals’ use, and misuse, of Standing Order 78. But armed with the right arguments, it’s worth a try.

Another thing they should do is ask for the censure of Jerry Yanover, the Liberals’ expert on parliamentary procedure. If he’s as brilliant as the cheerleaders in the Liberal media claim, then he knowingly advised his party to cheat. For someone headed toward retirement, that’s a sad way to go out.

A more radical move, if the Liberals try to use 78(2) to cut off debate on the same sex marriage bill, is to create two new 12-member parties from the Conservative caucus (12 is the minimum needed for official party status in the House.) This could lead to the ridiculous game of caucus splitting by other parties, but the end result would be to force parliamentarians finally to reform Standing Order 78.

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