Miss Joanie Anderson of Saskatoon

A fine, rare piece on YouTube: a 1965 edition of Oscar Brandt's "Let's Sing Out" featuring a young woman from Saskatchewan who would later become better known as Joni Mitchell. Singing her own original composition, "I Was Born to Take the Highway."

Even More Modest Proposals

I've had a few more thoughts on how we might reverse the population collapse in
Canada and the developed world.

First, put a heavy tax on contraceptives. In the old days, contraceptives were simply illegal; probably largely because they threatened the sustainability of the nation, as they do now. I assume it would be politically impossible to make them illegal again. Nevertheless, there is justification to at least hit them with the same "sin tax" we put on other disreputable pleasures, like alcohol and tobacco. Perhaps condoms could remain tax-free for their role in disease prevention.

Unlike so many political proposals, note, mine here would mostly cost government no money. In fact, they would probably increase revenues, especially this one. And my final suggestion is just as revenue-positive: automatic Canadian residence for any Filipinas of child-bearing age who wish to come.

I say Filipinas, not any other nationality, for a reason—the same reason that Filipinas are sought the world over as nannies. The Filipino culture places an extremely high value on children—the patron saint of the Southern Philippines, for example, is Santo Nino, the Holy Child. Just what we need.

This policy would do several desirable things at once, and at zero cost. First, of course, it would immediately boost the population of working age. Filipinos already speak English—there should be no lag before they were employable and contributing tax dollars. Second, given the Filipina specialty, this would at a stroke reduce the cost and boost the quality of child care in Canada, making it more appealing for Canadians to have children, and to have larger families. Unlike “day care,” this would require no staggering government expenditure—instead, the government could expect to profit from the increased business activity. Third, a large enough presence of Filipinas, otherwise very much like Canadians, thanks to their long colonization by Spain and the USA, might strategically graft this love of children onto the broader culture. Fourth, if only women were let in, as proposed, they would soon seek Canadian husbands. This would guarantee their full integration into existing Canadian society, and that of their offspring. Fifth, the extra women would permit many Canadian men to marry and have children who cannot at present. The cumulative effect could be overwhelming.

Granted, Canadian women might not appreciate the competition. But hey, let's remember: a women needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right? And the result would only be simple justice, since it is largely feminism which has brought us this population crisis. Canadian women have had their way in all things for over a generation now, while Canadian men as well as Canadian children have been correspondingly suppressed. This would only begin to right that balance.

The more so, of course, if each man were permitted four Filipina wives...

A Few Modest Proposals

The CD Howe Institute said recently it has run the numbers, and immigration cannot solve the problem of Canada's demographic collapse. Even at a level much higher than it is today, it just would not be enough. And this is without taking into account the fact that the supply of potential immigrants is itself not limitless—the demographic crisis is moving rapidly through the Third World.

The only real solution is to have more babies.

It seems to me there are a few policies the government could pursue to make this more likely—and all the other governments of the developed world should probably do likewise.

1. Free tertiary education for all. How many families balk at having another child for fear of the cost of a college education? In any case, there are other good reasons for doing this. First, it is an equality issue—without free tertiary education, we are not allowing all our young to compete on an equal footing. Second, it would promote a more skilled workforce, and a more meritocratic system, both of which are vital in order to compete in this increasingly hi-tech world. Third, it would probably more than pay back the government outlay over time by raising the incomes of the next generation, and therefore their tax brackets.

2. Ban abortion. This is a no-brainer. Currently, there is about one abortion in Canada for every two live births. Of course, there are also other, compelling, moral reasons for banning abortion as well.

3. Ban affirmative action for women. Women's pay before feminism was at a par with that of unmarried men. The premium was never paid for men, but for married men. There are practical reasons for this: married men, with a family to support, are much more stable and diligent employees. Accordingly, the main effect of affirmative action has been to penalize families and children in favour of single women. This is obviously bad policy.

4. Ban mandatory retirement ages. This will not direclty produce more babies, but it will ease the demographic crisis. And it is a human rights issue in any event. Everyone should have the right to work if they can physically and if they so choose.

5. Limit men's liability for child support. At present any man is putting his neck in a noose by having children. In case of divorce, he can be financially ruined. His liability should be limited to 25% of income or, say, $1,000 per month for the first, and $600 per month per subsequent dependant child, whichever is lower.

Some will want to argue that this is not recognizing the best interests of the children. I say nonsense—the best interest of the children is ensured by keeping the family together, and this limit on liability will make that more likely. Even if the family must split up, no child really needs more than perhaps $1,000 per month for a decent life—any more than that is probably going to the mother in any case.

Fathers could, of course, voluntarily pay more—or use any additional amount to negotiate their continuing custody or visitation rights.

6. Allow men to have four wives.

Well, there's no harm in asking, is there?

The Plight of African Women

A friend, a left-leaning columnist, tells the heart-warming story of an Ghanaian woman who came to Canada to get her Ph.D. Not forgetting her homeland, she has set up a charity offering microcredit to the women of her home village. Her name is Vida.

Here is my response:

I'm not at all sure Vida's charity is a good idea. I am not at all sure it is doing more good than harm.

Your column claims that women in Ghana are notably deprived of an education. Not true, according to the statistics at Nationmaster. Male/female attendance at primary and secondary school is close to 50/50: 47.4% female primary, 44.7% female secondary. For comparison, in Singapore it's 47.6% female in primary school; Netherlands 48.3%; Canada 48.8%. Not too far off the mark; and especially impressive in the Third World, where a lack of jobs makes it less useful to educate women as a practical matter. Indeed, your own column contradicts the claim that Vida's family was opposed to educating women: her elder sister, you note, was able to finance Vida's education, because she held a job.

Your column claims that hospitals and health care in Ghana discriminate against women. But again, the statistics belie this: as in most parts of the world, women's life expectancy in Ghana is higher than men's: 60.35 vs. 58.65 years.

You further claim that, in Ghana, men control the money. If so, Ghana is nearly unique in world terms: almost everywhere else, women do. This includes Canada: since long before “women's liberation,” and still today, women control fully 80% of all consumer spending. The typical situation everywhere is that the husband earns the money, the wife spends it. And, in fact, your own column again belies this claim: obviously, Vida's own sister was able to control her own money, to the extend that she had a large enough disposable income to support her sister in school. Note too, in Vida's micro-credit scheme, that the women are able to back one another's loans. Obviously, they have some cash to work with, entirely at their own discretion, despite Ghana's poverty, or this would not be possible.

Anecdotally, you tell the story of a woman who had to sneak away from her husband to get birth control pills. This is not too surprising. In an agricultural society, another child is usually of overall benefit to the family—not just one more mouth to feed, but two more hands to work, and one more member of the mutual support network. Each further child helps guarantee the parents' welfare in old age. For the wife, specifically, though, it represents a risk: death in childbirth is not that uncommon. So the husband is normally likely to want more children, while the wife may fear it.

But of the two, who is right? Who is thinking of the greater good to the greater number, of their family reponsibilities? It seems to me that supporting the wife against the husband in this situation is likely to be to the overall detriment of Ghanians.

There seems, in sum, no objective justification for the radical discrimination against men that Vida's project proposes; nothing, perhaps, but cultural prejudice. And is radical discrimination really a good thing to promote in Africa, which has been rocked so many times already with ethnic genocides?

As noted, the wife almost always gets to spend the family money at her own discretion. So what, exactly, is the point of putting this money very publicly in front of the whole village directly into the women's hands, ad Vida's scheme proposes? The only obvious value of this is to dramatically cut men out of the family equation, and to humiliate them—to subvert the family role of the husband and father as provider.

This obvious direct attack on the Ghanian family structure is more likely to increase poverty than to reduce it.

First, it is a serious thing to subvert the family in the Third World, because in such poor countries the family is the only form of social insurance there is. There is no government safety net—indeed, government barely functions at all, and commonly you cannot trust anyone outside your own family even to deal with you fairly. Beyond the family, it is almost a war of each against each.

Second, what is the likely and demonstrated reaction of men to having their family role as provider removed? Daniel Patrick Moynihan did a famous study of this years ago, in relation to the US welfare system. Most often, men in this situation do one of two things—or rather, families do, as the women's wishes are probably also involved: either the men stop working and relax; or they leave. Either way, the whole family suffers, and especially the children. As a result, the black family in America has almost disappeared since the 1940s, creating a permanent welfare cycle, a permanent underclass. The same is likely to happen in Ghana to the extent that Vida's approach is embraced.

Make no mistake; the result will be worse than a zero sum game. What more money the mother makes will be cancelled out by less from the father, yes. But the father is unlikely, on the evidence, to embrace the idea of taking care of the children now that the mother is too busy with her business. He's more likely to get drunk and stay drunk. Or go. And stacks of studies show that children suffer greatly every which way from having fewer than two parents. So the next generation is being mortgaged for the sake of this present social experiment; Ghana's future prosperity is being mortgaged.

I cannot imagine a more perfect recipe for Ghana's permanent colonization.

Some Say He's Hardy...

Having just watched the movie “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” (I watch movies while I exercise), I was pondering the British Empire—on balance, was it a force for good or evil.

So I thought, once again, I'd throw the question to Ask500People, and see what the world thought.

The overall result: 69% good, 31% evil. That's a pretty positive result, and belies the usual politically correct line. So much for “post-colonialism” and all that guff.

Here's an even more interesting result: a quick scan of the world map shows the opinion of the British Empire is especially positive not in Europe, but in the “Third World”--just the folks who are supposed to have suffered from it. South America and Africa love it. The Middle East loves it. So does India. The negative votes seem clustered in Europe—that is, the one spot that did not actually experience it.

To be perfectly fair, there were two former British colonies in which the negative vote surpassed the positive, though only by 1 to 0: Jamaica and Australia. Ireland posted no votes. In Britain itself, the feeling was perfectly ambiguous: a tie. In the US, the Empire swept two thirds of the vote. The two countries in which the British Empire seemed most popular were Brazil and Argentina. Argentina—Britain's opponent in the Falklands War.

Another folk version of Ave Maria for Canada Day

Raylene Rankin sings Ave Maria.

Cape Breton Responds

Not to be outdone, here are the Rankins doing it Cape Breton Highland style.

Leahy Show How it's Done in the More Traditional Irish Style.

Here.

Happy Dominion Day

Did you know there was a distinct Canadian style of stepdancing? It comes from my own home area, the Ottawa Valley. Here's an online illustration from YouTube.

Here's more from the Stepcrew.

As I think you will agree, it's a lot livelier than the Irish style, as practiced in the Peterborough region by Leahy.

And here's Father Eugene Morris doing it in the Cape Breton Highland style. Quite different again.

Idi Amin--Was He Really So Bad?

I am really out of touch with popular culture. I finally got around to seeing “The Last King of Scotland” just last night.

It was a disturbing experience.

Disturbing firstly, of course, for the horror it showed, with the knowledge that much of what it showed was not fiction.

But also disturbing for how the original story—I am old enough to remember Amin in power—has been subtly filtered through a lens of left-wing political correctness, and partly falsified. I fear that, as with The Da Vinci Code or Inherit the Wind, too many will be left thinking this is what really happened.

To begin with, the film makes it clear that, for whatever Amin did, white people were ultimately to blame. It prominently features an arrogant ferret-like British diplomat boasting that Amin was put in power by the British Foreign Office, to “keep the Africans in their place” and as part of some vaguely McCarthyite anti-Communist struggle. This is completely fictitious—the British Foreign Office documents of the time have since been declassified, and Britain had no part in Amin's rise to power. It is just one more attempt to blame everything on “colonialism” and the international WASP conspiracy. In fact, Amin taunted Britain more or less constantly—something the movie does show--and moved Uganda into the Soviet orbit—something about which the film is conspicuously silent.

Then the film twists the story of Kay Amin to push a pro-abortion message. In the movie, she dies from a botched “village abortion,” because she is unable to get a proper medical one within a bizarre personally set deadline of less than 24 hours—no matter the consequences, of which she is clearly warned in the movie.

The message is clear: women must be given free, unrestricted access to abortion on demand, or they simply cannot prevent themselves from going into back alleys to get themselves killed by coathangers.

Bollocks—Kay's actions in the movie are plainly illogical. And the real Kay Amin died from an abortion, all right. But it was an abortion performed in a medical clinic by a qualified doctor.

That, obviously, would not have sent the right message. Though it would have made far more plot sense.

Idi Amin too, if anything, mad as he seems in the movie, is given far too much credit for good intentions. I wonder if a white dictator who had done the same—killed up to 500,000 of his countrymen--would have been portrayed as sympathetically? He is shown as a basically decent if foolish man gradually driven to paranoia by real threats from his enemies. He seems in the movie to have been provoked by an early assassination attempt and an armed attack on a prison in Kampala.

This does not fit the facts. I cannot find any reference to an early assassination attempt. The attack on the prison, too, never seems to have happened. The mass executions of Acholi and Langi ethnic groups began almost immediately—and there was no chance anyone could have missed this, as the movie's protagonist does. Indeed, there was no attempt at secrecy. Amin's common practice was to have people, when seized, take off their shoes at the point of arrest—left on the roadside as a warning to everyone else. “Disappearances” were often preannounced on the radio, to heighten the terror. He expelled all the Asians in Uganda barely a year after coming to power. The reason was transparent, and it was not a fit of madness or misplaced patriotism: it was to seize their property. The technique had been perfected by Hitler against the Jews, and has been used since against whites by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

He was, wuite simply, a serial killer, a pure psychopath, in political power.

And for what it is worth, he shares one interesting biographical detail with many other known serial killers: an absent father.

Consider that next time you hear of a marriage breakup, and the de facto custody of the children being awarded—as it is about 94% of the time—to the mother.

Back from the Dead

Feeling nostalgic? Those of us who cut our teeth on the old Apple II may enjoy this site.