Tag Archives: Ontario

News

Taxpayer-funded polygamy in the UK, France and Canada

5 Comments

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

When a Muslim woman was fined late last month in Nantes, France for driving while wearing a full face veil, the issue of polygamy burst into the spotlight when it was revealed that her husband had three other “wives.”

The incident has re-opened the debate in Europe over the dilemma faced by European governments with, on the one hand, aging native populations and below-replacement birth rates, and, on the other, burgeoning Muslim immigrant populations with customs incompatible with existing laws.

Objections to his alleged polygamy were answered by the woman’s husband, Lies Hebbadj, an Algerian-born Muslim, who pointed out that, in accordance with modern French customs, he does not have four wives but one wife and four mistresses, plus 12 children between them.

“If one can be stripped of one’s French nationality for having mistresses, then many French could lose theirs,” Mr. Hebbadj, a halal butcher, said after consulting his legal counsel. “As far as I know, mistresses are not forbidden, neither in France, nor in Islam.”

Hebbadj reportedly became a naturalized French citizen after he married Anne, his French wife. But French Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, has said that Hebbadj could have his citizenship revoked if he his found to be practicing polygamy. Authorities are investigating whether he was legally married to the other women in civil ceremonies, and whether he was profiting from single mother welfare benefits the other women may have been receiving fraudulently.

The same thing is also happening in Canada and the UK.

Excerpt:

It was a rude awakening for British and Canadian taxpayers when news emerged this week to confirm that their tax dollars were being used to support polygamous marriages.

[…]British legislation from 2003 opened the door to the current situation by allowing multiple wives to inherit assets from a deceased husband. More recently, the government investigated claims that polygamists were taking advantage of the welfare system. It should have led to fines and legal crackdowns on abusers; instead it led to the creation of a new set of rules that allow polygamists to claim welfare benefits for more than one wife.

The government obviously wasn’t that proud of its innovative actions, since it acted quietly and without public consultation in agreeing to pay polygamists subsidies for additional housing and to grant additional tax benefits. Worse still, all payments bypass the wives and are given directly to the husband.

British citizens only found out about these changes when a newspaper broke the story last week.

At the same time, Canadian Muslim leaders admitted that hundreds of Muslim men in Ontario are now claiming welfare and social benefits for their multiple wives. This is welfare fraud. The system is supposed to prevent applicants from claiming welfare for more than one spouse, but the fraud works because they don’t check for independent applications from multiple spouses in the same household.

Under Muslim (Sharia) law, men are permitted to have up to four wives. If the paperwork is handled properly, that can put taxpayers on the hook for a huge monthly payment of social benefits.

I know that governments waste a lot of money, but this seems to me to be a particularly egregious example of the perverse incentives created by the welfare state. I have friends in Canada who are married with TWO children and are paying 50% of their income in taxes. Is this what they are paying for? It’s very frustrating to contemplate that traditional Christians are subsidizing polygamy. And abortion, too!

I believe in life-long married love between one man and one woman, because that is the best for the children. What do children who are raised in a polygamous marriage believe about women? Will they see romantic love being modeled in their own homes? It just wounds my heart. What is good for a man is to be in love with a woman and more than the feeling is the act of loving her alone, to the exclusion of all others.

The state should not be paying weak, cowardly men to degrade women like this. And with taxpayer money.

My view of love

My view of love and marriage is explained in the related posts. I’m a Christian, so I believe in chastity and romantic love. Notice how different that is from the secular and Islamic traditions. Christianity invented chivalry – romantic love is a Christian ideal. When Christianity declines, romantic love declines.

Related posts on chastity, chivalry, courtship and marriage

News

MUST-READ: How government-run day care impacts families

5 Comments
Using your money to limit your choices

Here’s a good editorial from Andrea Mrozek in the Ottawa Citizen, explaining how the bloated Liberal government that I blogged about recently is using a “public option” to stamp out stay-at-home moms and private child care options.

Excerpt:

Lisa MacLeod, MPP for Nepean-Carleton, found out the hard way that Ontario’s new all-day kindergarten will be somewhat less flexible than families were led to believe.

Her five-year-old was denied the opportunity to remain in half-day programming, because the school was chosen for full-day kindergarten. Alarming, yes, but not surprising. Province-wide, taxpayer-funded early learning programs spell the end of choice in child care.

You may remember Lisa MacLeod from this post in which I talked about her defending free speech in Canada.

More from the editorial:

[…]So how exactly is the Ontario Ministry of Education legislating choice out of existence?

For starters, simply by introducing a monolithic taxpayer funded plan — legitimate and regulated child care providers can’t compete. When the government subsidizes a service, it means others are put out of business.

All-day kindergarten also takes five-year-olds out of existing centres. These children are a day-care’s bread and butter. Care of five-year-olds is substantially cheaper than infant care, which runs into the tens of thousands of dollars annually. Since no child-care centre could possibly charge parents the true infant price, they have balanced their businesses by charging less than the real cost for younger kids and more for older ones. The older ones who will now enter the “free” state centres.

Families with a spouse who stays home are, as usual, totally pooched. Their taxes will rise for a service they don’t ever choose to use.

And she concludes:

Families understand budgets in a manner that governments clearly do not. When your money runs out, you understand that it’s not the time to book a vacation or add a latté a day. But in the last budget, McGuinty revealed a deficit of $19.7 billion and introduced new program funding of a billion dollars over five years for all-day kindergarten. Let the deficit rise, especially considering the real cost of all-day kindergarten should see that billion dollars almost double for one year alone.

In the end, the government will be the monopoly provider, giving you one solo choice. They don’t delicately tailor programs to meet personal needs. The Disneyland imagery of a better world courtesy of universal early learning programs has got to go — it’s not true in the research, and it’s not true in the reality on the ground. The truth is that government is substantially curtailing your choices while spending your money like a drunken sailor, for little to no proven returns.

They call that “equality”. Everyone has the same outcome, regardless of their personal choices.

You can find the PDF of her editorial at the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada’s web site.

News

Ontario Liberals abandon plan to sexualize children in schools

Leave a comment
McGuinty wants children prepared for anal sex in school

First some background from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced Wednesday that the Ontario government will be requiring Catholic schools to teach the new provincial, explicit sex ed curriculum that been slammed not only by Catholic leaders but the Progressive Conservative party and secular columnists.

“They’re part of the publicly funded school system here in Ontario and this is part of our curriculum,” said McGuinty, who says he is himself Catholic.  “If parents are uncomfortable with certain aspects of this new curriculum, they can and they are free to withdraw their children from the classroom.”

[…]The curriculum is designed to align with the Ministry’s equity and inclusive education strategy, which is seeking, among other things, to promote homosexualism and transgenderism in Ontario’s schools.

Sex ed is now set to begin as early as grade 1, where students will learn about their body parts, including genitalia.  In grade 3, they begin exploring “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  In grade 6, students are taught that masturbation is “common” and “not harmful,” and by grade 7 they are to learn about oral and anal intercourse and how to use condoms.

Leona Dombrowsky, Ontario’s new Minister of Education, also insisted Wednesday that Catholic schools must teach the new program.  “This is the Ontario curriculum, and it’s the curriculum for all schools and all students,” said the former Catholic school board trustee.

So Catholic-educated politicians were behind this initiative.

I think that Christians need to do a better job of integrating rigorous Bible reading, theology and ESPECIALLY apologetics into our church life. There should be debates and lectures by practicing scientists, economists, social scientists, philosophers and historians. If we insist on 5-minute homilies and praise hymns, then our own children will grow up to be tools of the secular left. Church should be about truth, not feelings.

You can see how different groups of Christians vote in this graph. I think we have a serious problem in the church where Christians who are solid on socially conservative issues think that corporations are bad, taxes are good and that we need to have government control carbon emissions and health care. Fiscal liberalism means sexualization of children in the schools. Lots of naive Christians vote to “help” the poor via big government.

Thankfully, in Ontario there was a happy ending – for now.

From the National Post. (H/T 1RedThread)

Excerpt:

Just days after defending a new sex education program that would include mention of homosexuality in Grade 3 and anal intercourse in Grade 7, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has backed down in the face of a public backlash.

[…]He insisted the new curriculum applied to “all students in publicly funded schools, including Catholic schools.”

His education minister, Leona Dombrowsky, also said the Catholic Church supported the new curriculum.

But Catholic officials made it clear they were not prepared to implement any of the more controversial elements, including talk of homosexuality and masturbation in Grades 3 and 6 respectively.

[…]Mr. McGuinty was squarely behind the new curriculum when he was first asked about it Tuesday morning.

“They are going to get this information,” he said moments after a Christian family values group alerted the media to the changes. “If we can provide [it] in a format and in a venue over which we have some control or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources, like their friends at school.

No mention of parents, who are too buy wasting their money on “beer and popcorn”, as Liberals have said in the past. No, it’s the government’s job to prepare children for sex early on so that feminists and gay rights activists can be appeased that the next generation will think that sex outside of marriage is normal. Because schools are about undermining the naive, outdated values of religious taxpaying parents.