By Terry Vanderheyden
OTTAWA, November 24, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canadian Liberal Social Development Minister, Ken Dryden, dismissed a Conservative Party proposal to offer tax cuts to parents who prefer to raise their children at home rather than in his proposed massive, government-funded day care program. Dryden has suggested that parents who keep their very young ones at home are like those who refuse to bring their children to a doctor when they are sick.
In Question Period Monday, Dryden claimed that the Conservative party is pitting one style of family life against another when they insist that Canadians parents should receive the same financial breaks for staying at home with their children or placing them in daycare.
“The only one who’s dividing families is Dryden with his refusal to acknowledge any other childrearing style than the one his government has decided is ‘right,’” stated a Conservative Party press release.
“I wonder why the party opposite has chosen to pit one style of family life against another?”, Dryden said. “The great majority of parents, even with young children, are both in the workplace, and that is a fact. Is the Member opposite suggesting that this great majority of parents who have their children in childcare are wrong? Are they self-indulgent, are they selfish or are they just plain stupid?”
Last year, in a November interview on Ottawa’s CFRA talk radio, Dryden dismissed helping stay-at-home parents – going as far as to compare them to parents who try to treat their children at home rather than take them to a doctor or to the hospital.
Dryden’s proposition has pro-family people upset. One blogger writing on the “Captain’s Quarters” blog wrote, “These kiddie gulags are centres for liberal indoctrination. And parents think because it’s free/cheap, it’s worth it. Lock up your children. A new generation of liberals is being cloned as we speak.”
Dryden also dismissed the reality that an overwhelming majority of parents would prefer to stay home with their young children as being nothing more than unrealistic wishful thinking. “A recent study… has found that most moms and dads with pre-school children would prefer that one parent stay home and take primary responsibility for raising the children…but if we asked the same group of people, or any group of people, if they would like to lose weight, 90% 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.”
Kids First children’s advocacy organization works to provide data that exposes unfair discrimination against family-based care-giving of children and those (mostly mothers) who do it. Kids First is launching a formal complaint with the United Nations over the Liberal’s proposed day care program, arguing that the program unfairly discriminates against stay-at-home parents who “have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child.”
“Discrimination is widespread,” the Kids First web site states. “It is found in legislation and policy concerning definitions of ‘child care’ that excludes care by family/parents; and by definitions of ‘work’ and ‘employment’ that exclude care and education in the home by family.”
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See the Kids First Parents Association of Canada web site:
https://www.kidsfirstcanada.org/
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Cabinet Post Serves to Alter Dryden’s Morality on Child Care – Flip Flop Minister?
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/05041305.html
Liberal Govt’s Child Care Discriminates Against 85% of Canadian Parents
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05101805.html
Conservative Woman MP Slams Liberal Party’s Child Care Plan as Sexist
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/feb/05021605.html