With universal day care, everyone, including parents who for whatever reason don’t like the idea of institutional day care, or who want to experience their children’s early years firsthand, even at financial sacrifice, ends up subsidizing child care for a minority, some of which is relatively well-heeled.

As Stephen Harper said about the Liberals’ “Henry Ford model” national system of institutional day care: “You can choose any colour you like, so long as it’s black. You can choose any child care you like so long as it’s nine-to-five institutional care, but who speaks for shift workers? Who speaks for the lowincome parent who cannot afford institutional care? Who speaks for rural Canadians?”

Not the Liberals.

Of course, universal day care is as much about social engineering ideology as it is about providing assistance for families. The Tory plan empowers parents by giving them discretion over how they direct government child-care assistance. With universal day care, if you want to benefit, you have to go with the prescribed government agenda.

The Liberals let this agenda slip rather deliciously with a couple of foot-in-mouth attacks on Dec. 11. Scott Reid, Prime Minister Paul Martin’s director of communications, blurted in a TV interview: “Don’t give people $25 a day (sic) to blow on beer and popcorn.”

Later the same day, on CTV’s Question Period, Liberal spokesman John Duffy underscored and embellished the gaffe commenting: “There is nothing to stop people from spending it on beer or popcorn or a coat or a car, anything.”

These eruptions of ill-considered candour epitomized reflexive Liberal arrogance and that while liberals fancy themselves champions and advocates of “ordinary people,” they neither respect nor trust them to make sensible, responsible decisions about important matters such as child care; ergo, left to their own devices, parents would choose beer and popcorn over quality care for their children.

As the late Christopher Lasch put it prophetically two decades ago, “As the family loses not only its productive functions, but many of its reproductive functions as well, men and women no longer manage even to raise their children without the help of certified experts … Persuasive as it appears at first sight, this argument on examination proves to be a classic example of the sentimentality of liberal humanitarianism, which invokes ‘diversity’ to support a system of compulsory schooling and proposes to rescue the child from the backward culture of his parents by delivering him into into the tender care of the state … “‘The consensus of the competent’… came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.”

Philosophically, this day-care modality issue boils down to statist collectivism versus individual self-determination (i.e., actual diversity).

However, there’s also another, more practical issue to consider with respect to universal day care that I haven’t seen mentioned much.

To wit: a national day-care program would open the door to mass unionization of day-care employees by a big public service union like CUPE, which will in turn drive costs up and leave the entire system vulnerable to massive strike action.

If you think costs got out of hand with the Liberal gun registry …