Harper: Willing to Bet the Farm on His Child Care Plan

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is willing to bet the future of his minority government on his paltry child care plan.

Speaking Tuesday at a community centre in Burnaby, B.C., Harper said he will follow through on his election pledge to give parents $1,200 a year per child under age 6 - even it means triggering another federal election.
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Harper warned the opposition to consider "the alternatives very carefully" if they vote against the budget.

"We will take that commitment back to Canadians if we have to," Harper said.

The man is politically tone deaf. He knows that none of the opposition parties will support his meager giveaway. He is incapable of compromise. Yet, he has the audacity to send a warning to them?

Let's take a look at Harper's plan as dissected by the Caledon Institute and presented to the media by the NDP's Olivia Chow:

Chow's demonstration featured Caledon's analysis of a hypothetical couple with one child and a family income of $30,000:

Annual family allowance: $1,200
Minus income tax ($362) = $838
Minus benefit clawback ($390) = $448
Minus Young Child Supplement ($249) = $199
Total: $199 per year (less than a dollar a day).

Only a fool would support such a plan as opposed to the one that had been brought in by the Liberals prior to their defeat:

The Liberals said their government had invested $5 billion in child care and signed agreements with all 10 provinces before they were ousted in the January election. They predicted 250,000 licensed child-care spaces would be created by 2009.

Upon taking office, Harper said the national child-care funding deal with the provinces would be phased out by March 31, 2007.

Perhaps the NDP should have thought of the repercussions of getting into bed with the Conservatives and the Bloc last fall which resulted in the downfall of the Liberals. The fact that they did so meant that they lost my vote in what was a very difficult decision-making process. But any left-leaning party that befriends the Conservatives when the Liberals were at least willing to listen to the NDPs and start moving back to the left while the NDP had no hope in hell of forming a lefty government deserves what it gets.

But, I digress...

If Harper truly believes that his government can still reign while remaining so inflexible over its child care plan and if he is willing to go down with the ship when he fails, so be it. He deserves whatever he gets too. For a man who complained year after year about the arrogance of the Liberals, it appears that his complaints were nothing but personally driven projection.