Another link for my vaccinations collection.

Measles outbreak feared in England, due to reduced uptake of the MMR vaccine over the past ten years. Reduced by how much, you ask? It's down from 90% in 1995, to - 80%. That's right, four out of five kids are still vaccinated, yet there are more than a thousand cases of measles so far this year and fears are growing of a widespread outbreak.

This is one of the few parenting issues where I do not believe that there may be more than one effective way to do things. With the exception of a very small number of people with a medical reason not to use certain vaccinations, everyone should be vaccinated and get regular booster shots throughout life. Not to do so is bad parenting and, in the case of adult booster shots, irresponsibility as a citizen in a modern country.

Get your kids vaccinated. It helps them exponentially more than it hurts them, and it protects everyone they come in contact with.

Oh, to be in that baby's place right now.

I feel the need to tweak the nose of my Prime Minister. He's being an asshat.

He was re-elected less than two months ago with a slightly-larger minority government than last time. That means he can't pass any laws without the support of members from other parties. The interesting fact is that he won that minority with exactly the same percentage of the vote that he had with the last, smaller minority. The difference wasn't in the number of votes the Conservatives got; it was in the split of the other votes. This time, the vote between the Liberals and the NDP was more evenly split. In ridings where the NDP were a distant third, that meant the Conservatives picked up the seat by coming up the middle. The gains for the NDP weren't nearly enough to counter that.

Well, now we've come to the first session of the new Parliament. As is expected after an election, there's a mini-budget on the table, to tide the country over until the spring budget. Some of the highlights of the budget:

1) Slashing federal funding to political parties, effectively hamstringing every party EXCEPT the Conservatives, far enough in advance of the Liberal leadership race that it would cripple that, too;
2) No stimulus package for the economy beyond what was already announced, in defiance of the will of EVERY OTHER PARTY, for which 63% of Canadians voted;
3) Caps on public servants' salaries, which I could support, as would many public-sector workers, if it didn't also include temporarily removing said workers' right to strike - a move which has pretty much no fiscal advantage to the government (in fact quite the reverse - workers striking saves the government money) making it a purely ideological move.

Now, it seems they're backing away from including #1 in the actual confidence motion on Monday. (BTW, if that motion doesn't pass, then the government falls and one of two things happens. Either the other parties come up with a working coalition and convince the Governor General that they can run the country, or there's another election.) But he has not backed away from that plan entirely, and the news articles repeatedly say that Flaherty (the finance minister) won't back down - he's just going to put forth that plan somewhere else, which means that, whether with this bill or another coming soon, the Opposition parties can't support the government without signing their own bankruptcy notices.

It looks to me like Harper is pushing a right-wing agenda that he knows won't fly with the other parties, in order to force the country into a second election less than three months after the last one, at a time when the Liberal party is effectively leaderless. And then he has the unmitigated gall to accuse THEM of toppling the government when they refuse to play his little game of right-wing chicken!!

So, a note to the Right Honourable Stephen Harper: 37% of the popular vote does not give you a mandate to dismantle our political system through underfunding. It does not give you a mandate to dismantle what Canadian unionized workers have been fighting for for more than a century. Tough times don't mean you get carte blanche to play on people's fears and set them against each other.

Put your politicking on a back burner and do what's best for the country for a change - instead of what's best for the Conservative party. And if you can't, there's money in my bank account to support whichever parties a) have a local representative and b) are willing to put their differences aside and form a coalition.

This time, I'll vote with more than a golf pencil at the school gym. I'll also vote with lawn signs, with my time, and with my words in this blog and elsewhere. I expect better than this of someone picked by 37% of my fellow Canadians to run this country. You owe it to Canada to give us better than this.