The Nanny State Letters & Golden Diaper Award

Intro: On February 28th, 2005 the Victoria Times Colonist printed an opinion piece by one of their regular writers and former editor Paul MacRae called "We can vote away the nanny state" where he went on about the "authoritarian nanny state" and against public services.

His article was insulting to nanny's, mothers and anyone who does care work both paid and unpaid and against the principle of caring in general.

In response to this, SWAG decided to present Mr. MacRae with the first ever Golden Diaper Award on International Women's Day because of this article in order to remind him that he was a baby once and was completely dependent on the kindness of a mommy or a nanny. See our press release for this event.

He was not at the Times Colonist Building when we dropped by with the award, so we sent him a second invitation to claim his prize at the 8th Annual Golden Corporate Piggy Awards on April 10th.

To everyone's great surprise he actually showed up and was a very good sport and made a short speech on his acceptance of the award. He defended his position of opposing the federal government's plan for a national daycare program but did apologize for insulting nannies which met with loud applause from the 200+ people in the audience.

What follows below are letters that were sent to Times Colonist and to SWAG in April 2005.

MacRae then wrote about accepting the award in an article that was printed on April 18th in Times Colonist where he fairly and accurately quoted from SWAG's press release about why he was given the award. He also defended his position on the importance of "self-reliance." He also encouraged us to send in an article in response to his article. This article was sent in on April 22nd but as of May 22 it has not been printed by the Times Colonist. After waiting a month, the article Dependence is Not a Dirty Word has been posted to our articles section.

The other day I happened to be reading an article called "We could vote away the nanny state" written by Paul MacRae in the Victoria Times Colonist (Feb 28, 05). It was about some reality TV tribe called the Ulongs and their contests with Korors. Paul didn't describe the men of these tribes too much, but the women got most of the attention. Some were athletic and possibly smart too, others were squinchy and nerdy. Others had no personality while a number of them were stupid and passive.

The adventures and attitudes of some were so upsetting for poor Paul that he started to imagine what if might be like if we lived in a Nanny State. Oh the horror of it. So Paul, I will give you a bit of insight on how a true Nanny State might look. Pour yourself a stiff one... you're going to need it.

First of all in a true Nanny State, a man would never be permitted to make the statement "I am wary of becoming a father" It would have been Divinely ordained beforehand that this was a man's natural function and to be wary about it would be holding God suspect, and a sin. A man's natural place would be in the home looking after the children while Nanny went out into the greater world.

The greater world would be set up in such a way that a men would find it hard to get any job except what a Nanny was above doing of course. He wouldn't get paid much as no use wasting good jobs on househusbands who will only end up back home when their Nanny has another kid for him to mind.

A man would be prevented by law from doing anything to avoid fathering any more babies even if his Nanny refused to provide for him. After a few generation he would lose heart on doing anything for himself anyway. He may even become stupid and passive like the women of the Ulong Tribe.

The Nannies would have a tremendous amount of power, legally and economically. Some of them would get so fat and bloated on the power that they would start to believe that the men and the children had nothing to do with them at all. They would prance about in Nanny uniforms with big pointy Nanny hats. They would become so obsessed with trying to outdo other nannies that they would become outright murderous. They would forget that people needed houses to live in or food to eat.

If any of the househusbands objected then they would be immediately bashed and told to shut up. After all, the Nannies were the only important people on earth now. Besides all the money was going for heavy equipment to outwit each other with. Machines such as the Happy Homemaker Mk 2 fully loaded prambulator with the ability to kill worlds, or the souped up Super Stroller Saracen model and sometimes even boats that would sink right away.

This is where things would start to come apart in the Nanny State. Some Nannies, angry and disappointed because of never having an authentic relationship with a househusband would roam the streets at night forcing men to have sex against their will and sometimes even killing them. This was tolerated under Nanny law. These were the storm trooper Nannies who kept men at home out of fear of violence.

Because they performed a useful community service, they were hardly ever charged with their deeds. The writing starts to appear on the wall however when Househusbands start getting wind of the fact that they have been taken for suckers and begin to refuse to make babies. Meantime the Nannies, now completely gone mad at the prospect of turning the entire world into a Nanny State, would do, say, print, or depict any manner of Blarney to try and cover their tracks. They would have to set up Nanny State funded programs to implement some damage control and to attempt to quell the growing social unrest.

But by now most Nannies were accustomed to their position of privilege and power and didn't want to give it up. They virulently blamed the househusbands for being ingrates and just didn't want to share. The only option for the Nannies was to ruthlessly crush, ridicule and brutalize any man that got in their way. After all, wasn't it all the unpaid labour of the househusbands that had the Nannies living in clover. This was our right! the Nannies all bleated in unison . "What would replace this kind of a system where a full half of the populace could live practically off the other" the Nannies would cry before they blew everyone to smithereens as everyone knows that a Nanny in a Nanny State always has to have the last word.

Well Paul, it's all been done before old chap. The only difference is, it was called a Daddy State and you live in it.

Good man yourself Paul

Yours Truly, Stephanie Lovatt

Read more of Stephanie's Letters

Letter to the Times Colonist
by G. H.

The "nanny state" obviously doesn't fit Paul McRae's own model of how an ideal society would work, which apparently is based on a tasteless low-budget TV series. But "Survivor" has zero relationship to a nanny state, just as it has zero relationship to real tribal societies. "Survivor" is not about taking care of people who can't take care of themselves; it is about ganging up on people who are weak or unpopular, and voting them off the Island. Real tribes have to cooperate and find ways to include people at all levels. Their goal is not to get rid of people until only one is left standing, but to keep their tribe strong by keeping all its members alive and well.

"Survivor" is similar to Enron's "rank and yank" system, where an employer gets rid of the bottom 15% of staff each year, no matter how good they are, just to keep the survivors on their toes. At my last workplace, our young supervisors forced professional staff twice their age, who had been on the job years longer than themselves, to play silly teaching games based on"Survivor." I watched our formerly pleasant and congenial workplace devolve into a snakepit where those who didn't fare well under the new regime soon found themselves "voted off the Island." So Mr. McRae will have to excuse me if I don't take well to "Survivor" as a model for the ideal Canadian society!

McRae has missed the point about government services. Government used to provide the essential services such as rail, ferries, hydro, petro, water, mail and primary education not because it could provide those services more cheaply or efficiently, but to ensure that the country would not be not held hostage by the whims of a market economy. We are already seeing a sharp decline in quality of service under privatization.

Only about 6 percent of our national debt is due to social programs. As McRae himself noted, $35 billion a year is going toward interest payments. If McRae wants to address that problem, he should campaign for reforming our financial institutions to allow the Bank of Canada to issue interest-free currency.

But it sounds as if McRae is actually complaining about the passing away of a different kind of "nanny state" - the one where every man was entitled to a big home, car and stay-at-home wife. This dream has always been out of reach of most of the world, but Canada lucked out for a while because this huge continent with its abundant natural resources was stolen from its
original inhabitants just in time to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution.

But homes cost more now because we have a larger population and our forest resources have been decimated - and because there is no longer a Ministry of Housing to build low-income housing units. (Instead, we now have a Minister for Homelessness!)

Driving a car costs more because our petro and mineral reserves have been depleted. Canadians earn less because they are compting with people in countries where workers are paid a pittance. Henry Ford made sure to pay his factory-workers enough that they could afford to buy a car; modern manufacturers no longer do this.

Overall, fewer Canadians are employed because many jobs have been outsourced, and because we can now get the same amount of work done with fewer staff.

Wives used to stay at home because it was hard for a woman, even one with advanced degrees, to find any job that paid a living wage. It is unfortunate that a woman's right to work has now turned into her necessity to work. But that has always been true for women at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid.

By definition, the people who have high income taxes to complain about also have high incomes. So reducing income tax will do nothing for the poorest Canadians - the ones who need help with child care the most - because their incomes are so low that they already don't pay any income tax.

But the root problem may be that we have a wonky accounting system. Providing for the basic needs of mothers and children is not a social debit; it is an investment. *Not* providing those needs will cost Canadians far, far more. Paul McRae, it's time you left that fantasy island and started living in the real world!

This was not a letter sent to the Times Colonist, but was a response written by a feminist activist to a woman who used the term "nanny state" on a progressive listserve.

I bristle with your regular use of the 'government as authoritarian nanny' analogy. I find it most distasteful and socially damaging. I am also repelled by its characterization of an occupation that's comprised almost completely of women, some of the most under-respected, under-remunerated, exploited women in our society, who are doing one of the nevertheless most valuable jobs in our society. Even if one does want to perpetuate the currently popular view (ironically most often promoted by people with particularly authoritarian values that government is (negatively) authoritarian, of all the authoritarian figures in society to which one could appeal how interesting it is that the figure chosen is a female and a female doing "historically female" work. I suppose it would be less logical, after centuries of persisting patriarchal conditioning on both sexes, to choose a male figure when wishing to illustrate authoriarianism, let alone government as authoritarian?! The Canadian Taxpaper Federation adores the authoritarian government as nanny analogy to which you regularly resort. Paul MacRae types manipulatively, disrespectfully employ it in their columns, as the column I posted here several days ago illustrated.

People can't blame their nannies for their lack of freedom
Letter to the Times Colonist, March 4, 2005 by S.C.

The Gods of all major religions are males, and so was Moses who received the Ten Commandments from the Judeo-Christian God. Plato and Confucius were men, as were the American ‘Founding Fathers’ and the Canadian‘Fathers of Confederation.’

Throughout history the vast majority of dictators, tyrants, kings, politicians, judges, religious leaders, lawyers, police officers and prison wardens have been men. So when media editorialists such as Paul MacRae use the term ‘nanny state’ not only are they factually wrong,they are being darn right ‘unmanly.’

Clearly, if citizens want to be ‘free’ from paying taxes for the laws and regulations their governments write and enforce they must stand up to Prime Minister Paul Martin and other world leaders, who are mostly men.

One big problem is that there's no universal consensus on what it means to a politically free citizen. For example, why do world governments take away people's individual freedom for smoking marijuana, while, at the very same time, most adults are free to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco?

Some people must believe the word ‘freedom’ means whatever they choose it to mean; or, that it means ‘the majority' can define political freedom as they so chose. But if it is somehow ‘wrong’ to tax people ‘against their free wills’ then it must be equally wrong for Paul Martin, U.S. President George W. Bush and all the other ‘daddy state’ politicians to put people in prison for growing, selling and buying marijuana.

People could argue that ‘democracy’ permits the majority to be the ‘daddies’ and tell everyone what they can and cannot do. But what if the majority of world citizens ‘vote’ to put people in prison for drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco? Or what if the majority decided to ‘force’ everyone to believe in their God and go to their church?

There are many vital questions about what it means to be free; so there's a desperate need for a worldwide public debate on this issue. But this public debate is being seriously impeded by people who blame ‘nanny states’ for everything under the sun while ignoring the obvious fact that staggering amounts of tax dollars are being used to pay politicians, lawyers, judges and generals to enforce ‘daddy states’ all over the world.

Dear Paul,
I found your letter uninformed and disrespectful.Thank goodness the large majority of Canadians and British Columbians acknowledge the need for good child care, social services to assist those in need, and all the health and community supports that you consider "extras" to the real business of men making money. Glad your mother didn't think so.

Judy Lightwater