08.19.2011 08:03 AM

Hudak PCs: families helping families is “ridiculous”

11 Comments

  1. walt says:

    Jim Wilson’s function within the party is apparently to make Hudak look normal and bland in comparison.

  2. just call me Rick says:

    Insert foot in mouth. These guys just keep on giving. Tim Hudak on crime resonates emotionally , and now Tim Hudak on families complements it with a theme at the heart of our evolutionary survival. We need a triology. Tim Hudak on jobs/economic security?

  3. Northbaytrapper says:

    It is a silly announcement. There are so many details to flesh out that the announcement is more of a wouldn’t it be nice.

    The province is nearly broke and Ontario business is strained to the limit and then some so Dalton decides to throw this into the mix. It’s foolhardy. Heck, why not make it 60 weeks, and while you’re at it throw in another holiday, perhaps in November, it needs one. It’s good politics though so I’m sure the rabble here will love it. Just as I don’t celebrate when Harper plays chess with his checkers opponents, folks shouldn’t celebrate when Dalton does it.

    • Attack! says:

      Very revealing, Trapper, but 2 things in response.

      First, it’d be one thing to call an announcement “premature,” for its want of details, and for being done in advance of consulting and nailing down agreements from a prospective major funding partner.

      But it’s quite another to call it “ridiculous” — i.e., worthy of scorn and derision — on that basis. Because that word choice can — and arguably just has! — backfired, big time, and, far from being foolish, ‘floating a trial balloon’ like this can actually be very shrewd, from a political point of view, as you yourself go on to concede:

      not only to open the door to the opposition shooting themselves in the foot with a hasty and over-revealing reaction, like Wilson’s, but also to sound out popular support, and, in the process, to strengthen one’s hand and exert pressure ON those partners in advance of the negotiations. Many levels of Cndn. govt’s have done this to various degrees of success (incl. the CPC, with their ill-fated trial balloons on whether to fund the QMI/Nordiques arena; I’ll leave it to others to supply more successful examples).

      Second, you yourself couldn’t help but confirm WK’s implication that Wilson (and the Tories he’s ostensibly speaking for) weren’t just responding to the timing and scant details of the announcement, but to its fundamental substance: to the very idea of extending family leave, once more, beyond bereavement and terminal care leave, to encompass taking time off to care for loved ones with serious injuries (like from a car crash) and shorter term (but potentially recoverable) illnesses.

      And here, although it’s still an open question about whether there’ll ever be any money to accompany this (I suspect not, from the feds, any time soon (but for the first point above), given Harper’s near-pathological antipathy to even the very idea of EI, much less to extending it, but it’d soon become one of the extended benefits for unions to bargain for and more progressive employers to offer), but an important first step is to provide legislative protections to guarantee that one can return to one’s job after taking time off for this reason.

      No doubt, plenty of people said similar things about how preposterous it was to even consider, much less introduce, these various measures which: forbade employers from forcing women to continue working right before and after having a baby; or made it illegal to fire or refuse to hire them because they were, or might be, having a baby; or required them to hire them back after having one…

      http://www.strocel.com/history-of-maternity-leave-in-canada/

      http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/lp/spila/wlb/wfp/11maternity_leave.shtml

      And yet the champions of such progressive measures persevered, and now we have a whole suite of maternal and parental leave programs, including for adoptive parents. And that’s a good thing, not worthy of ridicule.

      Will this produce hardships for employers? Yes, but so does having distracted and stressed out employees and having to deal with the turnover when they decide their family takes precedence and they have to quit.

      So, instead of dismissing this out of hand, people should look at this as an opportunity, to develop more temp agencies to try to meet that need.

  4. Mike London says:

    Not that it’s relevent to the story, but wow, he looks at least ten years older than he actually is.

  5. Lipman says:

    Another failed Mike Harris retread back to tell us how Ontario should be run! Give me a break. Given their history in the 1990s and early 2000s, this crowd should finish in third place and not be taken seriously. Wilson and his pals should be rememberd for the chaos they caused in schools, selling off public assets, leaving massive deficits and lying about their existence, hospital closures, forced amalgamation, etc etc etc.

    Mike Harris is still incredibly unpopular at the door in Toronto, and his egregious legacy looms large over a party which is increasingly looking like it it did under his reign- but with more fringe zealotry.

    Bring it on

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