Tue Feb 22/05
Daddy Daycare

The Liberals' national daycare program is altogether baffling to me — for starters, because it seems to me that the exact same thing can be engineered through tax breaks. It's not as if this government should have any confidence in its ability to properly manage very large projects, so undertaking one for which there's so little demand really is courting disaster.

As such, I do not envy Ken Dryden for having this portfolio thrust upon him. I don't envy him having to deal with invective like Rosa Ambrose's okay-because-a-woman-said-it comment: "Working women [people, shurely! –ed.] want to make their own choices, we don't need old white guys telling us what to do." And I certainly don't envy him trying to explain why the Vanier Institute for the Family's survey results (in which people expressed a not-so-stunning desire to be home with their children) mean absolutely nothing in this context.

Still, I really appreciated Dryden's response, even though it flew miles over the heads of Ambrose, the assembled MPs and the poll-crazed media. "Polls allow us to say 'Yes' to a number of often contradictory things," was the basic premise:

"As parents we all feel guilty about the time we are not spending with our kids, but if we asked the same group of people or any group of people if they would like to lose weight, 90 per cent would say 'Yes'.

"If we asked them if they would like ice cream once a week and chocolate twice a day, about the same percentage would say the same. The question, as in all of these questions, is not what we would like to do, but what we will do, and what we do."

I can just picture the looks of befuddlement from the backbenches. Someone really should have translated that into House of Commons-speak for him — "How dare the minister point out my race? When will she resign?" — but it's always nice to see that a few people in the building are at least capable of higher reasoning. What a shame that it's being put to use on a program that will likely (and deservedly) die before it's ever born.