If there is one thing that can be said about Liberals, they certainly like to add colour to their policy manuals. The latest instalment comes courtesy of the Liberal Women's Caucus and their release of The Pink Book: A Policy Framework for Canada's Future.
The authors of the Pink Book are Liberal MPs and collectively receive an annual salary of $1.3 million from taxpayers. For this they offer Canadians a shallow take on feminist thought. Their "new" proposals include: reversing the Conservative government's tiny budget cuts, providing some $5 million in funding to the anachronistic Status of Women department and $1 billion a year to fund institutional day care, a policy the party advocated in the last election and was rejected by voters. These ladies, however, are now proposing the equivalent of 1% of the gross domestic product to early learning and child care. But can any of them spell "deficit"?
According to StatsCan, Canada's GDP will be about $1.4 trillion this year -- 1% means a funding commitment from taxpayers of $14 billion.
Other un-costed ideas include establishing a federal poverty reduction strategy and implementing pay equity. And, of course, these MPs pander to their ideological base by calling for reinstating the Court Challenges Program as well as the continuation of Ottawa's long-gun registry, a billion-dollar boondoggle.
Add it all up and the Liberal Women's Caucus just tacked on billions more to the bill for taxpayers. Of course, we all want to end poverty. But history shows government isn't the solution. Consider that every year Ottawa spends $8 billion on native programs yet poverty is rampant on reserves.
The tenor of the "womyn's" book is to establish the Conservative government as mean, boorish rubes who want to keep women barefoot, pregnant and poor. To buttress the argument on pay equity and the fabled wage gap, the Pink Book cites a 2003 statistic that women earn 71% of what men earn -- a figure that has been discredited.
In the pay equity debate this statistic cannot be repeated often enough.
But this is not about equal pay for equal work, which is the same paycheque for the exact same job regardless of the employee's gender. To discriminate in any way on the basis of gender has long been illegal, as it should be.
Instead pay equity is equal pay for similar jobs. It is a nebulous comparison requiring an army of bureaucrats, armed with slide rulers, to determine what wages should be.
Instead of using bogus statistics, a better comparison is wages of university graduates. Here we find more women enrolled in undergraduate programs than men. And out of school, these women earn as much as their male counterparts graduating from the same field of study. Education is the equalizer, not pay equity.
On reinstating the Court Challenges Program, the Pink Book states "access to justice for all Canadians will be severely eroded and especially so for women and francophone minorities." What they fail to mention the purpose of this program was to pay tax dollars to the lawyers of special interest groups to fight government legislation in court. This means advocating for things like giving prisoners the right to vote, making it a criminal offence for parents to spank their children, and the right to collect welfare regardless of the income earned by a common-law spouse residing in the same house.
No doubt the Liberal Women's Caucus worked hard to resurrect their ideological agenda for feminism in Canada. Instead of highlighting pretty colours, the Liberals -- men and women alike -- will need to focus on fresh ideas if they hope to again win votes from middle-class Canadians.
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