The federal government wants to fund school food programs throughout the country. In what world can anyone oppose this? In ours, alas. Here's why that opposition is totally nuts.
I can buy that but we should keep in mind that poor kids live in poor .. most often women led single parent families. There is something Victorian about feeding only children while Mom at home goes hungry. Of course we can raise income supports as well as provide food and we should do both. Best
There is absolutely no question that we should feed children and do our level best to ensure that no one goes hungry especially in a country as wealthy as Canada. Canada despite its enviable record on many things has many social programs, all underfunded and all providing benefits designed more to keep the recipients in the situation they are in than to help lift them out of it. We could ensure that virtually no one goes hungry, if we implemented an Annual Baric Income program, federal in nature that on its introduction would start above the poverty line and have annual increases based on the rate of inflation. With such a program we could eliminate programs such as Ontario Works, ODSP, EI, supplementary pension and much more. It would bring a sense of dignity to the recipients and end the facade that we are doing something meaningful to help the less fortunate when in fact we are not. Implementing such a program would see the modern day Conservative Party and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business scream bloody blue murder but it would offer a wonderful opportunity for the less fortunate to build meaningful lives for themselves and their families. It would cost far less than the multitude of programs, each with its own separate bureaucracy, cots taxpayers now.
It boggles my mind that something that should be entirely uncontroversial like 'here is federal money for school nutrition programs' and (perhaps I have rose-coloured nostalgia glasses) that the Opposition might have supported in years past with a snarky line about how this wouldn't be necessary if the current government yadah yadah yadah economy something so they could look good AND get a shot in all at once.... is now the dumbest reason to posture and start a fight.
These are such politically dumb times.
The PR move here is that NDP should be arguing that it's not enough and too late in coming and the CPC should be arguing that they'd have made things so much better that this wouldn't be necessary (NB: they wouldn't, but that's another issue) but of course they are all about begudgingly helping families deal with the government's economic failures (and this way no one can talk about how the CPC supports starving children) and then they could all support the bill and still shit on Trudeau and then they feed hungry kids and look, everyone wins.
It's taken us a long time to get from Dickens to this point, where we have some of the services his London poor needed, but are still fretting about their souls and "moral hazard". If it's bad for the soul to be given free stuff, then *inheritance* should also be a sin, to save the souls of the inheritors. But, noooooo..... that's sacred.
I learned during the pandemic of the Sikh home city, where the "Langar" runs 24 hours a day, providing endless free meals to all, you can just live there. And we are very, very rich compared to the citizens of Amritsar. Every school would be the perfect place to provide 3 meals a day, with take-home boxes for the family. We could just...do that.
The Federal Government has also picked up… well… has expanded it’s program of funding affordable housing. They already subsidize housing for low-income Canadians. They have long been facilitating the building of co-operative housing communities. They have now expanded the building of affordable housing outside of the co-operative housing framework.
Why? Because the provinces and cities continue to pretend that they are encouraging developers to include affordable housing in new developments, even requiring it with penalties if they don’t. However, when developers claim “they ran out of money before they got around to the affordable housing components” or, as in Ottawa, they pay the city “cash in lieu of” including affordable housing and public parking, the city eagerly accepts that and then pretends that this isn’t a problem.
And, of course, you have the factions who either call “affordable housing” “low income housing for people on welfare” or they say “the government should make it possible for people to buy homes”.
The fact is that “affordable housing” is simply housing that is affordable to the average renter and ENOUGH affordable housing for those people who need housing can find it. If people can afford rental housing that doesn’t require renters to work two jobs to pay for, they can save to buy a house.
I’ve lived in a co-op for 24 years. I’m a senior on CPP and OAP. While my rent would be affordable for a working family, I need a boost so am eligible for and receive a subsidy from the federal government.
Other families live in the co-op for 8 or 9 years and can afford to buy their first home.
The Conservatives under Harper wanted to eliminate the federal programs that help subsidize low-income families just like they want to axe other federal programs to improve the lives of Canadians. They want the provinces and cuties to do that… while the provinces and cities won’t do it. And… if they do, the same people who object to programs to help feed kids or provide emergency housing to the under-housed or victims of domestic abuse whine and complain that they aren’t making the poor pull up their bootstraps.
Simply put.. I support providing nutrition where it is needed.
As long as oligarchs continue to dominate our lives with orice hikes because they have the unopposed clout to do so.. we the people must pick up the slack.
A solution would be to break up the monopolies but not party of any stripe has the courage.. least of all Pierre Poilievre who is in bed with big oil big food and anyone who will line his pockets.
I don't have a problem with feeding kids. I do have a problem however with a society in which kids don't get fed due to structural inequities, i.e, those resulting from treating people unequally, and then implements a raft of programs run by civil servants to put band aids on the symptoms instead of fixing the real problems.
To whit, a tax system that favours capital over labour, including when that capital happens to be residential real estate. Also, a system that tries to fix income inequality (through welfare, and a raft of tax credits) without taking marginal tax rates into consideration. Total welfare + tax credit clawback combined with regular taxes can result in an effective marginal rate of well over 80% in some bands. You know how the rich squeal when their top rate goes over 50%, why do we tolerate it for those at the bottom? That's just nuts, and speaks to the empire building, horse trading and incompetence that gets taken for granted in the halls of government.
How to fix this? Replace all current welfare and tax credits with an individual based basic income (no, not a livable income, people still need to understand individual responsibility) with supplements for children, seniors and disability, and reform the income tax system so that taxes start where that basic income leaves off, i.e, no overlap. This could be done with a clawback of 40% for working age individuals, AND, a flat rate of tax of about the same. Imagine that! Implementing basic income and lowering the top rate at the same time!
The real kicker is that the federal government could pay for this by replacing provincial transfers with a federally funded basic income so provinces wouldn't need to provide welfare. But wait, provincial transfers are baked right into the frigging constitution! That means you need to amend the constitution just to get a working economic safety net!
This is not brain surgery folks! It's mostly just simple arithmetic. (OK, it's a lot of arithmetic in a really big spreadsheet, but it's still just arithmetic!)
You see now why I support sortition? Politicians can't be trusted to do anything right, and we're now past the point where it's become obvious that they never could.
Overall, I think this is a good investment. A couple of comments…. 1) “the Feds have a lot of money”: no, they have a lot of OUR money. And they no longer have a lot of it, because they spent it unwisely and disrespectfully. If they had any financial sense, wisdom or even sense of accountability to their employers (us), they would have lot of money, but, again, it would be our money. 2) they are not proposing this to benefit Canadian children - they are doing it because they are failing at everything else, hence, the delay in announcing something promised in 2021. And all of the other promises from 2015 and 2019, which would have maybe prevented many of the problems we are all facing now. There was always need for healthy lunches (and breakfasts) for school kids, why the urgency now? (beyond the massive increase in unvetted immigration causing massive needs for all).
How inconvenient there are no concrete success measures. Kinda like Guilbeault stating we may see the benefits of the carbon tax until 2060. It’s like the lack of accountability is built in
Didn’t Justin lift millions of poor kids out of poverty or have the liberal/NDP government given up on that talking point?
Also is there any way I’ll stop having to pay for these FREE (sic) programs Dental, Pharma and the “$10 a day daycare” (BTW I haven’t heard of anyone who actually gets daycare for $10 a day).
It would be good to explore the cost of the program via inflation.
We all like the idea of feeding kids. But more and more of us cannot do so because we keep buying what we want with printed money.
We have printed over a Trillion dollars since Trudeau was elected, nearly doubling the money supply.
I suppose when you’ve already printed so much money, you’d be tempted to say “what’s another billion” . So rather than framing it as one thousandth of what we have already printed in the last decade, you can think of it as $29 is new inflation for every single Canadian citizen. For how many Canadians will this $29 in lost spending power mean they cannot feed their own children?
I can buy that but we should keep in mind that poor kids live in poor .. most often women led single parent families. There is something Victorian about feeding only children while Mom at home goes hungry. Of course we can raise income supports as well as provide food and we should do both. Best
There is absolutely no question that we should feed children and do our level best to ensure that no one goes hungry especially in a country as wealthy as Canada. Canada despite its enviable record on many things has many social programs, all underfunded and all providing benefits designed more to keep the recipients in the situation they are in than to help lift them out of it. We could ensure that virtually no one goes hungry, if we implemented an Annual Baric Income program, federal in nature that on its introduction would start above the poverty line and have annual increases based on the rate of inflation. With such a program we could eliminate programs such as Ontario Works, ODSP, EI, supplementary pension and much more. It would bring a sense of dignity to the recipients and end the facade that we are doing something meaningful to help the less fortunate when in fact we are not. Implementing such a program would see the modern day Conservative Party and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business scream bloody blue murder but it would offer a wonderful opportunity for the less fortunate to build meaningful lives for themselves and their families. It would cost far less than the multitude of programs, each with its own separate bureaucracy, cots taxpayers now.
It boggles my mind that something that should be entirely uncontroversial like 'here is federal money for school nutrition programs' and (perhaps I have rose-coloured nostalgia glasses) that the Opposition might have supported in years past with a snarky line about how this wouldn't be necessary if the current government yadah yadah yadah economy something so they could look good AND get a shot in all at once.... is now the dumbest reason to posture and start a fight.
These are such politically dumb times.
The PR move here is that NDP should be arguing that it's not enough and too late in coming and the CPC should be arguing that they'd have made things so much better that this wouldn't be necessary (NB: they wouldn't, but that's another issue) but of course they are all about begudgingly helping families deal with the government's economic failures (and this way no one can talk about how the CPC supports starving children) and then they could all support the bill and still shit on Trudeau and then they feed hungry kids and look, everyone wins.
It's taken us a long time to get from Dickens to this point, where we have some of the services his London poor needed, but are still fretting about their souls and "moral hazard". If it's bad for the soul to be given free stuff, then *inheritance* should also be a sin, to save the souls of the inheritors. But, noooooo..... that's sacred.
I learned during the pandemic of the Sikh home city, where the "Langar" runs 24 hours a day, providing endless free meals to all, you can just live there. And we are very, very rich compared to the citizens of Amritsar. Every school would be the perfect place to provide 3 meals a day, with take-home boxes for the family. We could just...do that.
The Federal Government has also picked up… well… has expanded it’s program of funding affordable housing. They already subsidize housing for low-income Canadians. They have long been facilitating the building of co-operative housing communities. They have now expanded the building of affordable housing outside of the co-operative housing framework.
Why? Because the provinces and cities continue to pretend that they are encouraging developers to include affordable housing in new developments, even requiring it with penalties if they don’t. However, when developers claim “they ran out of money before they got around to the affordable housing components” or, as in Ottawa, they pay the city “cash in lieu of” including affordable housing and public parking, the city eagerly accepts that and then pretends that this isn’t a problem.
And, of course, you have the factions who either call “affordable housing” “low income housing for people on welfare” or they say “the government should make it possible for people to buy homes”.
The fact is that “affordable housing” is simply housing that is affordable to the average renter and ENOUGH affordable housing for those people who need housing can find it. If people can afford rental housing that doesn’t require renters to work two jobs to pay for, they can save to buy a house.
I’ve lived in a co-op for 24 years. I’m a senior on CPP and OAP. While my rent would be affordable for a working family, I need a boost so am eligible for and receive a subsidy from the federal government.
Other families live in the co-op for 8 or 9 years and can afford to buy their first home.
The Conservatives under Harper wanted to eliminate the federal programs that help subsidize low-income families just like they want to axe other federal programs to improve the lives of Canadians. They want the provinces and cuties to do that… while the provinces and cities won’t do it. And… if they do, the same people who object to programs to help feed kids or provide emergency housing to the under-housed or victims of domestic abuse whine and complain that they aren’t making the poor pull up their bootstraps.
Simply put.. I support providing nutrition where it is needed.
As long as oligarchs continue to dominate our lives with orice hikes because they have the unopposed clout to do so.. we the people must pick up the slack.
A solution would be to break up the monopolies but not party of any stripe has the courage.. least of all Pierre Poilievre who is in bed with big oil big food and anyone who will line his pockets.
I don't have a problem with feeding kids. I do have a problem however with a society in which kids don't get fed due to structural inequities, i.e, those resulting from treating people unequally, and then implements a raft of programs run by civil servants to put band aids on the symptoms instead of fixing the real problems.
To whit, a tax system that favours capital over labour, including when that capital happens to be residential real estate. Also, a system that tries to fix income inequality (through welfare, and a raft of tax credits) without taking marginal tax rates into consideration. Total welfare + tax credit clawback combined with regular taxes can result in an effective marginal rate of well over 80% in some bands. You know how the rich squeal when their top rate goes over 50%, why do we tolerate it for those at the bottom? That's just nuts, and speaks to the empire building, horse trading and incompetence that gets taken for granted in the halls of government.
How to fix this? Replace all current welfare and tax credits with an individual based basic income (no, not a livable income, people still need to understand individual responsibility) with supplements for children, seniors and disability, and reform the income tax system so that taxes start where that basic income leaves off, i.e, no overlap. This could be done with a clawback of 40% for working age individuals, AND, a flat rate of tax of about the same. Imagine that! Implementing basic income and lowering the top rate at the same time!
The real kicker is that the federal government could pay for this by replacing provincial transfers with a federally funded basic income so provinces wouldn't need to provide welfare. But wait, provincial transfers are baked right into the frigging constitution! That means you need to amend the constitution just to get a working economic safety net!
This is not brain surgery folks! It's mostly just simple arithmetic. (OK, it's a lot of arithmetic in a really big spreadsheet, but it's still just arithmetic!)
You see now why I support sortition? Politicians can't be trusted to do anything right, and we're now past the point where it's become obvious that they never could.
Overall, I think this is a good investment. A couple of comments…. 1) “the Feds have a lot of money”: no, they have a lot of OUR money. And they no longer have a lot of it, because they spent it unwisely and disrespectfully. If they had any financial sense, wisdom or even sense of accountability to their employers (us), they would have lot of money, but, again, it would be our money. 2) they are not proposing this to benefit Canadian children - they are doing it because they are failing at everything else, hence, the delay in announcing something promised in 2021. And all of the other promises from 2015 and 2019, which would have maybe prevented many of the problems we are all facing now. There was always need for healthy lunches (and breakfasts) for school kids, why the urgency now? (beyond the massive increase in unvetted immigration causing massive needs for all).
It's a provincial responsibility. Suddenly it's a crisis requiring a national program because…Trudeau is behind in the polls.
How inconvenient there are no concrete success measures. Kinda like Guilbeault stating we may see the benefits of the carbon tax until 2060. It’s like the lack of accountability is built in
Didn’t Justin lift millions of poor kids out of poverty or have the liberal/NDP government given up on that talking point?
Also is there any way I’ll stop having to pay for these FREE (sic) programs Dental, Pharma and the “$10 a day daycare” (BTW I haven’t heard of anyone who actually gets daycare for $10 a day).
I thanks for this.
It would be good to explore the cost of the program via inflation.
We all like the idea of feeding kids. But more and more of us cannot do so because we keep buying what we want with printed money.
We have printed over a Trillion dollars since Trudeau was elected, nearly doubling the money supply.
I suppose when you’ve already printed so much money, you’d be tempted to say “what’s another billion” . So rather than framing it as one thousandth of what we have already printed in the last decade, you can think of it as $29 is new inflation for every single Canadian citizen. For how many Canadians will this $29 in lost spending power mean they cannot feed their own children?