Andrew Coyne nails it today. (subcriber only, if I can find a link I will post it)
...But it wasn’t a gaffe: It’s Liberal policy. This wasn’t some no-name MP wandering off-message. This was the Prime Minister’s chief spokesman. It wasn’t an inadvertent slip of the tongue, or an unguarded moment. It was a considered, deliberate soundbite, delivered on national television. And in case there were any doubt of its purpose, the comment was repeated, defended and elaborated upon later in the day by another of the Prime Minister’s soundbiters, John Duffy. The apologies came only after they had measured the media reaction.
...It may be a silly way of putting it, but it reflects a sincere belief that parents are not the best people to look after their children — that others, more expert, are.
...Is that not the implicit, if not the explicit message of the Liberals’ own daycare policy? To hear the Grits talk, you’d think they were dividing up the loaves and fishes: for whereas the Tories would fob off parents with a measly “$25 a week” for each child under six, the Liberals would spend “billions” creating “spaces.” As always, they’re hoping nobody does the math: When you add up all those measly individual payments, the Tory plan would pump twice as much money into daycare each year as the Liberals’, money which, when presented to daycare providers, has a way of opening up “spaces.” It’s just that these spaces would not necessarily be where the government prefers, but rather where parents preferred. And that’s the difference between the two plans. The implications are inescapable. The Liberals don’t trust parents to choose the right daycare provider, for the same reason they don’t trust them to decide whether to put their kids in daycare at all: because, fundamentally, they don’t trust parents. They don’t think they’re up to it. It’s true that some parents would spend the money on beer and popcorn, or smokes and bingo, or I don’t know, guns and porn. But you either believe that most parents are responsible adults who want the best for their children, or you don’t. And if you don’t — if you don’t think parents
can be trusted to act in the best interests of the child when it comes to choosing between daycare and popcorn —why would you trust them with other decisions? Why would you trust them … at all? You can go a long way with that kind of thinking. It isn’t only parents, after all, that can’t be trusted to spend their money wisely. Taxpayers are much the same. (Tax cuts? They’d only blow it on pizza and video games.) Also consumers and investors: rather than leave it to consumers to choose, for example, which cars will be produced, or investors to anticipate which company’s cars will attract consumers’ favour, the Liberals have already decided on their behalf, in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies to the auto industry.
