The British Grasshopper

How it Used to Be: The squirrel works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building and improving his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the squirrel is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold

How it is Now: The squirrel works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the squirrel is warm and well fed.

A social worker finds the shivering grasshopper, calls a press conference and demands to know why the squirrel should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate, like the grasshopper, are cold and starving. The BBC shows up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper; with cuts to a video of the squirrel in his comfortable warm home with a table laden with food. The British press inform people that they should be ashamed that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so, while others have plenty.

The Labour Party, Greenpeace, Animal Rights and The Grasshopper Council of GB demonstrate in front of the squirrel’s house. The BBC, interrupting a cultural festival special from Notting Hill with breaking news, broadcasts a multi cultural choir singing “We Shall Overcome”. Ken Livingstone rants in an interview with Trevor McDonald that the squirrel got rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the squirrel to make him pay his “fair share” and increases the charge or squirrels to enter inner London.

In response to pressure from the media, the Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The squirrel’s taxes are reassessed. He is taken to court and fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as builders for the work he was doing on his home and an additional fine for contempt when he told the court the grasshopper did not want to work.

The grasshopper is provided with a council house, financial aid to furnish it and an account with a local taxi firm to ensure he can be socially mobile. The squirrel’s food is seized and redistributed to the more needy members of society, in this case the grasshopper. Without enough money to buy more food, to pay the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, the squirrel has to downsize and start building a new home.

The local authority takes over his old home and utilises it as a temporary home for asylum seeking cats who had hijacked a plane to get to Britain as they had to share their country of origin with mice. On arrival they tried to blow up the airport because of Britain’s apparent love of dogs. The cats had been arrested for the international offence of hijacking and attempted bombing but were immediately released because the police fed them pilchards instead of salmon whilst in custody.

Initial moves to then return them to their own country were abandoned because it was feared they would face death by the mice. The cats devise and start a scam to obtain money from people’s credit cards.

A Panorama special shows the grasshopper finishing up the last of the squirrel’s food, though spring is still months away, while the council house he is in, crumbles around him because he hasn’t bothered to maintain the house. He is shown to be taking drugs. Inadequate government funding is blamed for the grasshopper’s drug ‘illness’.

The cats seek recompense in the British courts for their treatment since arrival in UK.

The grasshopper gets arrested for stabbing an old dog during a burglary to get money for his drugs habit. He is imprisoned but released immediately because he has been in custody for a few weeks. He is placed in the care of the probation service to monitor and supervise him. Within a few weeks he has killed a guinea pig in a botched robbery. A commission of enquiry, that will eventually cost 10,000,000 and state the obvious, is set up. Additional money is put into funding a drug rehabilitation scheme for grasshoppers and legal aid for lawyers representing asylum seekers is increased.

The asylum-seeking cats are praised by the government for enriching Britain’s multicultural diversity and dogs are criticised by the government for failing to befriend the cats. The grasshopper dies of a drug overdose.

The usual sections of the press blame it on the obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity and his traumatic experience of prison. They call for the resignation of a minister.

The cats are paid a million pounds each because their rights were infringed when the government failed to inform them there were mice in the United Kingdom. The squirrel, the dogs and the victims of the hijacking, the bombing, the burglaries and robberies have to pay an additional percentage on their credit cards to cover losses, their taxes are increased to pay for law and order and they are told that they will have to work beyond 65 because of a shortfall in government funds.

Originally published: September 5, 2007 at Political Correctness Watch.

Elections Canada Comes Under Fire for “Vote Veiled” Initiative

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has joined with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD) in criticizing Elections Canada’s recent decision to let Muslim women wear face-concealing burqas while voting.

The federal election regulator announced last week that Muslim women would be allowed to “vote veiled” in upcoming by-elections in Ontario and Quebec, by merely producing two pieces of ID or swearing an oath and having another voter vouch for them.

Harper said yesterday that he “profoundly disagrees” with the decision, noting that all four federal parties voted this past spring for a law requiring the visual identification of voters.

David Harris of the CCD, meanwhile, said that the Elections Canada initiative “violates the basic premise of public voting in Canada and the principle of equality of all Canadians before the ballot box. It is an invitation to fraud, misrepresentation, and the debasing of our democratic electoral system.”

There is little doubt that outrageous decision to “accommodate minorities” with special treatment will meet with plenty of opposition from Canadians, hopefully forcing Elections Canada to scrap its vailed voting position, just as Quebec’s Election Commission was forced to do with a similar initiative earlier this year.

Educational Freedom Takes Front Seat in Ontario Election Campaign

Education policy, and most notably educational freedom, is already a hot-button issue in Ontario’s provincial election campaign, which officially kicks off tomorrow.

Conservative opposition leader, John Tory, promises that his government would fund faith-based schools, giving parents more economic freedom when it comes to their children’s education – something that current Liberal Premier, Dalton McGuinty has opposed throughout his time in office.

Policies surrounding school funding have a profound effect on taxpayers whose children attend private and faith-based schools which are not subsidized by the government. McGuinty’s government scrapped Ontario’s private school tax credit in 2003, forcing many children into public schools and taking away a significant amount choice and flexibility from parents.

The provincial government continues to fund Catholic faith-based schools, in addition to Ontario’s own public school system, but will not provide any support to parents who choose independent religious or secular private schools.

This conflict ultimately boils down to the personal freedom of parents to choose how their children will be educated versus the government’s statist attitude to socialized education.

“It’s such a small issue in the big picture, but it’s obviously pulling at the emotional strings of a lot of people,” commented executive director, Elaine Hopkins, of the Ontario Federation of Independent Schools.

The only fair solution is for provincial governments to provide meaningful tax rebates to parents who choose an accredited private school over the state-controlled public school system. Economically incentivizing parents to consider Ontario’s private schools, which already serve approximately 120,000 children, would ultimately shrink size of government and offer new choices and possibilities to parents and children.

Relaxing Regulations Could Help BC Labour Market, Says Fraser Institute

British Columbia is the third strongest performing labour market in Canada, behind Alberta and Saskatchewan, but could rise to the number one spot with looser provincial labour laws, according to a recent report by the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based free market think-tank.

Alberta came out on top of the study, which measured employment growth, productivity, unemployment, and other factors in each U.S. state and Canadian province. Saskatchewan scored the tenth place overall, while BC came in twelfth. No other Canadian province made the top-30.

“If we actually improved the characteristics of labour markets we would be among the top performing labour markets in North America,” explained the Fraser Institute’s director of fiscal studies, Niels Veldhuis, who credits the three western provinces’ booming economies for their current strong performance. “We would probably be No. 1. And that’s the message here for B.C., that we can be even better than what we have been in the last five years if we improve some of our characteristics.”

This could mean relaxing labour laws, reducing the percentage of employees working in the public sector, and reducing the minimum wage in relation to the average wage, Veldhuis said.

“All of these things have been shown by academic research to have negative impacts on labour markets,” he said, giving Alberta as an example of a free market leader. “They have lower unionization, they have less public-sector employment, they certainly have a much lower minimum wage relative to the average wage, and they have more balanced labour-relations laws.”