Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Why don’t you ask the parents you screwed, Mary Anne?

Ontario children’s minister Mary Anne Chambers is quoted in the Globe and Mail today, wondering what will happen to the nanny-state nannies if voters are so impertinent as to toss out the federal Liberals. She asks us to “imagine how they [government-funded day care centres] would feel if even this first five years of a $5-billion plan were undermined or cut short.”

Fortunately, Ms. Chambers need not speculate. All she needs to do is ask how the parents of independent school students felt when her government retroactively cancelled their tuition tax credits. Although the McGuinty government was not elected until October of 2003, it cancelled the tax credits retroactively to January 1st, a callous and vindictive act towards low- and middle-income parents who were denied the partial reimbursement of tuition for not only the school year that had just begun, but half of the previous school year as well.

She might also ask how the parents of autistic children felt when Dalton McGuinty broke his written promise to them to fund intensive behavioural therapy past the age of six years. McGuinty has retreated to the former Conservative government’s line that autistic kids over the age of six would be better served in the education system. The Conservatives may not have been angels, but as MPP John Baird (now running for Parliament in Ottawa West-Nepean) has often said, at least they didn’t lie to parents of autistic kids.

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