The War Against Christianity Continues in Quebec

The culture of death marches onward in Quebec and since religion is in the way it must be eliminated. Tasha Kheiridden has this article in today's National Post.

Christmas? Hannukah? Eid al-Adha? Bah humbug. In the spirit of the holiday season, the Quebec government has announced its intention to secularize daycares:

Starting in June, publicly funded daycares that teach a particular faith to their young charges risk losing their government funding.

“All questions touching the transmission of faith – that is, teaching religion itself – do not belong within the publicly funded daycare system,” Quebec Family Minister Yolande James said in an interview on Tuesday.

In other words, he who holds the purse strings calls the shots – and the government has decided that religion will get the heave-ho-ho for the toddler set. This brings home the point that if parents expect to get state subsidies, they will have to submit to state rules. Of course, if those rules are unreasonable, they should be modified. But the point is, you never know when they will become unreasonable: governments change, and a bureaucrat’s whim can become your three-year-old’s reality. . . .

If the Quebec government cut its daycare subsidy, which hit $2 billion in 2010-2011(along with many other parts of its bloated bureaucracy), it could give all citizens a tax break, thereby making other child care options – like staying home with your child – more affordable. Alternatively, it could means-test daycare subsidies to low-income parents, as opposed to making them a universal benefit, and thereby cut down on the cost of the program to taxpayers. It could also offer income splitting to families, by which parents would save money and apply it to the child care model of their choice. But then the state might see a large swath of its toddlers singing religious Christmas carols, or painting pictures of Menorahs. Heaven forbid!

It might also see a more successful, well-adjusted generation of children. In a study published in October 2010 by the Montreal-based think tank CIRANO, researchers concluded that Quebec’s emphasis on daycare has led to worse learning outcomes:

“… More preschool children are in non-parental childcare at a younger age and the intensity of childcare has increased over the years….. the evidence presented shows that the policy has not enhanced school readiness or child early literacy skills in general, with negative significant effects on the (picture and vocabulary test)scores of children aged 5 and possibly negative for children of age 4.’’

For families, choosing care free of government subsidies, or working fewer hours so one or both parents can care for their children themselves, both mean less money for other things. Of course, it also means that their children will be raised in accordance with their parents’ values, in a setting over which they have more control, and where, apparently, they learn better. The Quebec government’s latest expression of the nanny-state is a reminder that, just like with health care, there is no “free ride”. When we relinquish choice, we all pay – and unfortunately, so do our kids.

Classical Liberalism and individual choice are dead in Quebec. The province increasingly follows the European model of utter secularism as a totalitarian ideology that seeks to eradicate religion, inculcate relativism and make the State an overbearing, interfering entity with Divine pretensions.

So much for freedom of religion - at least for Christians and Jews. There is only room for one god and one religion in a secularist society and that is the religion of State-worship. Thus the idea of the West ends in the daycares of Quebec not with a bang but with the whimper of toddlers of the state bereft of their heritage, their religion and their freedom.