Thanksgiving Throwdown

Last week, the Harper government made a series of particularly bone-headed funding cuts, including one I expressed concern about earlier in this blog.

Among other things, they:

• Cut literacy funding, even as labour market shortages across the country reach critical proportions.
  
• Cut the Court Challenges Program, a program which has enabled many historic wrongs against minority groups to be reversed, without individuals having to personally bankroll the teams of lawyers needed to try landmark cases.
  
• Cut money for The Volunteerism Initiative, even as these cuts inevitably mean more and more and more of the help for our most vulnerable is going to fall on volunteers - or in the absence of those volunteers to catch them, those vulnerable fall right through the cracks.
• Cut research into medical marijuana, just prior to it being announced that yet another potential benefit - staving off Alzheimer's disease - may result from medicinal use of the drug.
  
• Cut funding for women's advocacy groups, who - whether you agree with them on any given issue - are dedicated to trying to improve the lot of 52% of the population of Canada.
  

That isn't even the whole of it. They cut programs aimed to assist Aboriginals and to preserve our country's heritage (a series of museum program cuts hits painfully close to home, as that is my sister's area of employment).

But it's only over if we roll over on our backs and play dead. This afternoon I got an urgent email from the NB Status of Women's Advisory Council mailing list reminding us that this is Thanksgiving weekend, a long weekend when we'll have more time than usual to turn our minds away from just keeping up with the regular workload and on to more lofty issues. They also point out that our MPs will almost all be in our home ridings over the Thanksgiving Weekend and it is an ideal time to reach them with a phone call or letter.

It also occurs to me that there is no better time to speak up on these fundamental issues than at Thanksgiving, a time when I am usually thankful to live in a country that respects and supports diversity, minority rights, and a form of benign social democracy that usually - usually- is based on the principle that as you make your way in the world, you turn back and hold out a hand to those coming behind you. That leads the way in developing and offering social programs, not slashing them.

This government has, just six months into their mandate, and with a record budget surplus stretching its coffers at their seams, already forgotten that.

If none of that is enough to move you to contact your MP, maybe this hysterical (and I use the word advisedly) press release from so-called "Real Women" (COUNTER-ATTACK BY FEMINISTS) will convince you that they're still scared and for good reason: there is time to ameliorate these short-sighted cuts to social programs, and to our very core values as a country.

Here's your MP. You got a long weekend coming up. Do something before we see the beginning of the unhappy slide to the loss of freedom, liberty and civil rights our friends to the south are suffering under.

ronnie