Charity Begins at Home

Our local newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, is running a series of articles about the recipients of their Christmas fund. I thought that the articles were written to evoke sympathy for families who are much worse off. I wonder if it's only me, but I find it difficult to feel sympathy for a family of welfare recipients who have been on the dole for 10 years and currently have six children.
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=852d6c8b-969a-422b-a545-7870c3a25516

The mother originally arrived in 1997 and worked for a year. Then she married and started producing children. In the last 10 years, she has had six, which is an average of one child every 18 months. I don't have a problem with large families. My mother was one of four children and my father was one of five.

The big difference is that they worked hard to support their families.

There is something fundamentally flawed with a system that rewards welfare recipients for having more children than they can afford. Why stop? Each additional child means more revenue for them and higher taxes for me.

Slavery is not dead. It's alive and healthy in Quebec

It's interesting that at the same time as the United States of America elects a black president, the Quebec government calmly announces that "mandatory overtime" will be required from nurses.

Quebec nurses are now slaves. It's true that they are still being paid, and are probably getting overtime rates, but forced work is still coercion.
If a private company were to demand mandatory overtime, there would be a huge outcry. Amnesty International would be writing about their terrible working conditions. Janet Bagnal would be writing reams about the poor women being forced to work long hours or risk losing their jobs. Instead, it's business--sorry, government--as usual.

I'll remember this, the next time someone claims that capitalism turns workers into slaves. It's clear that the guilty party is the government, and the nurses' slavery an inevitable result of its incompetence and mismanagement. You want government-controlled healthcare? This is the outcome: "mandatory overtime" aka servitude aka slavery.

University suspends blood drives to protest federal ban on gay blood donors

from Freakonomics: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/the-freak-est-links-111/
"A Bay Area university has suspended all campus blood drives because of a long-standing government policy that bars gay men from donating blood, putting renewed attention on an issue that has been a sore spot at many liberal colleges."

The Canadian Red Cross was sued for billions of dollars when people were infected by tainted blood. The resulting restrictions make it very difficult for many people to donate blood. Gay men are one of those groups who have a higher risk of supplying tainted blood.

I'm all for reducing risk, but this University is making it difficult for non-gay men to donate. As a result, everyone suffers.

My solution is simple: Allow gay blood donors but segregate their donations from the general population. All University people who agreed with the suspension would draw blood from the bank of gay donors.
They would be able to compare relative risk with political correctiveness...