This Week in Alberta - Iris Knows Best
She may not know a lot about delivering balanced budgets, but Alberta's Finance Minister Iris Evans knows how you should be raising your children:
She reportedly said good parenting means sacrificing some income to stay at home when kids are young, which her children have done.
"They've understood perfectly well that when you're raising children you don't both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise," Evans told the audience. "This is not a statement against day care. It's a statement about their belief in the importance of raising children properly."
[...]
"The huge failure of Canadians is not to educate the children properly, and then why should we be surprised when they have mental illnesses or commit dreadful crimes?" she asked.
posted by calgarygrit at
8:22 a.m.
8 Comments:
For some reason, as I read this, an image of Michelle Bachmann flashed in my mind....
By
Anonymous, at 10:12 a.m.
no hat tip, makes me sad
By
Anonymous, at 10:59 a.m.
So my Bell-employed eldest, recent double-major Concordia grad middle, and survey-firm star producer youngest are all going to turn into axe murders any day now??? Just because I went back to work when all were just months old? [sigh]
By
MedEditor, at 11:41 a.m.
I was wondering where Iris Evans got the "Very Conservative" leaning she gave herself on Facebook given that it clearly wasn't from her fiscal policies. Mystery solved!
By
Brian Dell, at 12:26 p.m.
To a certain extent, this incident is a bit of a tempest in a teapot, but it's interesting to me because we're witnessing a schism developing between the "fiscal Conservatives" and the "social Conservatives".
I have always wondered how Conservatives could reconcile support for a "free market" and support for "traditional family values".
The "free market", for example, dictates that people move to where the work is, which often results in tearing apart the "traditional family" (in my view, the "traditional family" is an extended family, with uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents all in close proximity.)
The "traditional family" requires that one makes decisions NOT based on economics, which means NOT working overtime, NOT working after hours at home, and NOT having two parents working to obtain "the better things" in life(or simply survival)and is thus antithetical to "free market" interests.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out within the Conservative parties. If they end up staking out the territory of "social" conservatism as portrayed by Evans' comments, there's an opening for the provincial Liberals to stake out "fiscal" conservatism with socially liberal values. I know they've been trying to do this in Alberta, but not all that effectively, in my view.
By
Party of One, at 5:50 p.m.
I don't think it's a "tempest in a tea-pot" as one commentator put it, that our Finance Minister would make such a self-righteous and insensitive comment.
It makes me wonder how that lack of judgment plays out in her professional capacity.
By
Fakirs Canada, at 2:19 a.m.
It's a tempest in a tea-pot to the extent that the comments made were in response to a question from the audience after the delivery of a address describing Alberta's plans for borrowing $1 BILLION a year for the next five years.
I don't think that there can be a bigger indictment of the Torys' lack of ability to manage the economy in Alberta than the fact that after years and years of surpluses there aren't sufficient resources left to accomodate a downturn. Now, Albertans are going to have to face more program cuts, fee increases, etc., as the Conservatives generate deficits caused by lack of prudent fiscal management.
Yes, the comments were stupid and insensitive and self-righteous, but they weren't in any way a formal statement of public policy. I too question Evans' judgement, but I would be much more concerned if she was saying this sort of thing as Minister of Social Services or Education or even Health.
By
Party of One, at 2:20 p.m.
"I have always wondered how Conservatives could reconcile support for a "free market" and support for "traditional family values"..."
Well I think the Canadian left and right both response to the same problems - free markets cause social dislocation. Where they differ, Conservatives tend to prefer addressing those problems outside the state, through voluntary organizations, while the left prefers to slow down the pace of free markets using government/the welfare state (though in practice, once in power, they are all the same).
By
french wedding cat, at 4:05 p.m.
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