Liberal Budget Educated in Red Ink
The Ontario Liberal budget was released yesterday: As expected, costs are going up, while revenues tank, the deficit is $50 billion, the debt, well, the debt is now more than $300 billion. With those apocalyptic figures, I am not sure how worried we should be that wine is going up ten cents a bottle. Perhaps the rise in gas costs is more troublesome, four cents a litre, the result of Kathleen Wynne’s mafia-esque cap-and-trade system, wherein companies pay the government for the great honour of burning fossil fuels and emitting the compound that every plant lives on, yes, carbon dioxide, which is in turn exhaled by plants as oxygen. All the money from this racket will go into ‘green technologies’, almost all of which are bottomless money pits. Thus, we have a dilemma: If oil ever returns to ‘normal’ to stabilize the Albertan (and Canadian) economy, we may end up paying $2 per litre to drive our cars and heat our homes. If oil does not return to the prices we were used to (and there are few signs it is), Canada is facing imminent bankruptcy and insolvency. I myself am banking on the latter, but will still fill up my tank.
Speaking of insolvency, perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the budget (besides new money for stem cell treatment, a whole topic in itself), the Liberals have now offered ‘free’ tuition to students whose parents make less than $50,000, and generous grants to those who make less than $80,000. Of course this is not ‘free’, for we all pay for it, at least those of us who make a wage. We were already subsidizing the vast horde of millennial-age post-secondary students to more-or-less goof off for four years (or fewer if you fail out, an ever-less likely outcome, given the financial incentive universities have to keep students). I know. I was there once.
Ponder this for a moment. Every young person now after high school will have no reason not to go to university, and every reason (from a certain worldly viewpoint) to go, which means that the government will not only indoctrinate them all through elementary and high school, but now into their twenties and beyond. Their minds and souls will be formed in the mold of our socialist technocrats mouthing in unison all the politically-correct mantras. Hey, but who wants diversity, unless it is the ‘wrong’ kind? What was that Jesuit maxim, ‘give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man’. Now we are offering our enlightened teachers and professors the ‘child’ for the first quarter of a century, half-way to middle age, and what will we get? Well, I don’t think too many well-formed ‘men’, or women for that matter.
I heard the government plans to fund this boondoggle by taking away whatever tax credits allowed beleaguered families to try to provide some alternate (read: private) education for their young people. If so, things just got a lot more difficult for those of us who believe in freedom of choice in education.
As I have written before, our modern universities do not offer what our venerable ancestors (including our parents) would have called an ‘education’. In fact, the students graduate generally less educated, or at least more mis-educated, than when their fresh faces first walked through the doors to face that week of brazen debauchery endearingly known as ‘frosh week’. At the very least, their ignorance of the most important aspects of our culture and civilization remains woefully intact. Even showing up for class is optional. Almost guaranteed is the fact that they graduate more immersed in immorality than when they entered. As an experiment, if you ever get the chance, ask someone unfortunate enough to live in or near a student ghetto. Of course, there is always some good everywhere, but the overall effect of our now-even-more publicly funded post-secondary system is deleterious and this new policy, like most Liberal policies, does not bode well for our future.
I am beginning to think that the only way our government will ‘get it’, that expenditures do have a limit, is, like a drunken sailor waking up in the gaol, to experience some sort of economic crisis, even collapse. I fear that only this will wake us, and the deluded Liberals under the money-no-object Wynne, well and truly up. Sometimes we wander so far from the truth that it has to take us, like a thief in the night, when we least expect it.
Carney’s Amoral Majority
After five defections – euphemistically described as ‘crossing the floor’ – and three by-elections, Mark Carney and his Liberals how have their coveted majority. One wonders what bowls of pottage were offered in back-room deals. In the archaic monarchical system that is the Dominion of Canada, this majority allows the newly-minted Prime Minister to rule[…]Continue reading→
Saint Kateri , Canada’s Protectress
This was the title given to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, by Pope Benedict XVI, when he canonized her on October 28th, 2012, along with six others, in Saint Peter’ Square (she had been beatified by Pope John Paul II back in 1980). With Saint Joseph as our protector, along with the Canadian martyrs, we seem to[…]Continue reading→
A Tale of Two Benedicts
A grace-filled Holy Week to all our readers! As we await and prepare for the Resurrection about to dawn upon us, we might keep in mind two Benedicts: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, requiescat in pace, elected on this day in 2005; and today’s commemoration of the mystic pilgrim, Benedict Joseph Labre, who died on this[…]Continue reading→
My Name is Bernadette
April 16th is a propitious day, for besides the anniversary of Father de Valk’s death, who founded Catholic Insight in its print form decades ago, and the commemoration of the ‘two Benedicts’, mentioned in accompanying posts, today we also recall Saint Bernadette Soubirous, the young visionary to whom the Virgin Mary appeared numerous times at[…]Continue reading→
Saint Lydwina of Schiedam and Suffering Joyfully
Saint Lydwina of Schiedam (1380 – 1433) was one of the countless and glorious ‘victim souls’ in the history of the Church, those whose lives are filled with suffering, often of an unimaginable intensity, but who suffer joyfully. She was a fifteen-year old Dutch girl, out skating one day, when she fell and broke one[…]Continue reading→
The Glorious Martyrdoms of Martin and Maximus
As we enter into Eastertide, we recall on this 13th of April Pope Saint Martin I (+655), one of the noblest, if most tragic, of the successors of Saint Peter. Born in Umbria, Italy, he was of noble lineage, with great intelligence combined with charity and love of the poor and the Church. While still[…]Continue reading→
Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów
We celebrate Saint Stanislaus today (+ April 11, 1079), in light of this Easter Octave, a bishop and martyr who accepted the episcopacy only at the direct order of Pope Alexander II. He proved a wise and courageous leader of his flock, put to death by his own king, Boleslaus, for rebuking the monarch’s ‘immoral[…]Continue reading→
Saint Gemma Galgani
On this April 11th, in 1903 – the same year that the Italian Guiseppe Sarto was elected Pope later that summer as Pius X – a lovely, young Italian woman died, by the name of Gemma Galgani. She lived a brief life of 24 years, as did a number of other young saints, including Pier[…]Continue reading→
An Ideological and Improper Translation
I noticed something odd with the psalm reading at Mass the other day. Our bishops’ conference here in Canada has decreed that the Mass in English – Novus Ordo – use the ‘NRSV’, the ‘New Revised Standard Version’, an ‘updated’ translation of the original RSV, first published in 1952. This ‘new translation’ has the tendency[…]Continue reading→
Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle: A Teacher for Teachers
Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651 – 1719), a French nobleman, ordained a priest, founded the first order in the Church’s history entirely without priests, and this came about almost by accident. I say ‘almost’, for, of course, there are no accidents with God. Destined for ordination from an early age, Jean-Baptiste never looked back, even[…]Continue reading→