PM cuts literacy funding as wife promotes literacy.. duhhh

[Grimmlok]

Laureen joins literacy crusade
On Monday, Tories cut reading program
Sep. 29, 2006. 05:26 AM
SUSAN DELACOURT
OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF


OTTAWA—Literacy — it's all about reading, writing and getting your story straight.

Or so it seemed this week in Ottawa.

On Monday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government axed $17.7 million from the human resources department's Adult Learning and Literacy Skills Program as part of a wave of spending cuts.

Yesterday, Harper's wife Laureen was on the streets of Ottawa, promoting literacy.

Clad in a yellow T-shirt and handing out newspapers in the drizzle as part of a CanWest media company promotion of child literacy, it seemed that perhaps Laureen Harper hadn't seen the memo about the literacy cuts earlier in the week.

Ditto for Harper's chief of staff, Ian Brodie, who coughed up a $20 literacy donation when he came across his boss's wife on the street in front of the Parliament buildings.

Treasury Board President John Baird, who announced the cuts on Monday, was also part of the CanWest street campaign.

"It appears that the Prime Minister and his wife are reading from different pages these days," Bonnie Brown, the Liberal MP from Oakville, said yesterday in the Commons.

"Now that the Prime Minister's wife has publicly demonstrated the error of her husband's government's ways, will the Prime Minister immediately restore funding to literacy programs?"

The CanWest promotion is called "Raise a Reader" and is aimed at improving literacy in children.

The Conservative cuts are directed at adult-literacy efforts. So the difference, it seems, revolves around when the government should pay for people to learn to read and write.

This appeared to be the distinction that Baird was making yesterday, as he performed the simultaneous feat of explaining literacy cuts and campaigning for literacy at the same time — outdoors, on the street, no less.

"I think if we're spending $20 million and we have one out of seven folks in the country that are functionally illiterate, we've got to fix the ground floor problem and not be trying to do repair work after the fact," Baird said as he handed out newspapers alongside Laureen Harper.

In the House of Commons yesterday, meanwhile, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley showed how well she reads her talking points, saying that Liberals did the true damage to literacy, freezing programs during the deficit-cutting budget of 1995.

"Hypocrisy has a new spelling. It is L-i-b-e-r-a-l," Finley said.

Finley also argued that if Liberals were in favour of literacy, they shouldn't have voted against this year's budget, which contained $307 million for such programs.

with files from Canadian Press

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...2154&t=TS_Home

I love that.. "you should have voted for the budget if you like literacy, despite the budget shoving money into stupid things like missile defense and corporate handouts"

[Sojiita]

OMG..Canada is soooo fucked up!

[Grimmlok]

Canadian politics is like watching a Monty Python skit.

[AliceInWonderland]

thats the same thing here in the US; Bush has majorly cut school and after-school program funding (moron!) and Laura is supposed to be all about caring about our children and their schooling and bla bla bal; its such bullshit!

[pacific breeze]

One of Harper's key people is Stockwell Day, who was involved in book censoring and burning in Alberta. *sigh* Another born-again fucktard.