How do hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, including for anti-racism and child-care inclusion training, end up in the hands of a radical anti-Israel, anti-capitalist activist group in Prince Edward Island? These are the sorts of unhappy questions that arise when trying to follow the tens of billions of additional dollars governments have poured into child care since the federal government’s national child-care program launched in 2021.
Background on P.E.I. child-care funding cuts
For background: there has recently been significant consternation in the P.E.I. child-care sector because the provincial government cut $1.4 million in funding for support staff. The effect on operators is significant, the cuts took place without consulting the sector, and some operators have considered service disruptions such as strikes to protest them. Frustration is understandable: expanded government control of child care made operators reliant on government funding, and now some of the funding is going away.
But while the provincial government said it cannot afford the $1.4 million for staff funding, its child-care spending plans for the past year included a combined $1.25 million for administration (such as IT costs) and diversity and inclusion programs. This is what happens when the government takes over a sector: more money for bureaucrats and pet projects and less for actually providing services.
The role of BIPOC USHR
The P.E.I. government’s plan says its inclusion strategy included consultations with various organizations, including one called BIPOC USHR (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour United for Strength, Home, Relationship), which the provincial government has funded and partnered with prolifically in recent years. In the past, for example, the government paid BIPOC USHR to deliver a series of anti-racism workshops to child-care workers and Department of Education and Lifelong Learning staff.
The benefits of such anti-racism training are dubious, especially when you consider the list of “educational resources” on BIPOC USHR’s website, including such titles as “Information on the Hamas Charter,” “Zionism is white supremacy,” and “Kwame Ture on Zionism and Imperialism.” I learn from Wikipedia that Kwame Ture once said in a speech, “I have never admired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler.” But Kwame Ture apparently considered other white men great, too, because the “educational resource” on the BIPOC USHR website is a video clip which begins with him referring to “that great man, V.I. Lenin.” (Vladimir Lenin’s middle name was Ilyich).
Meanwhile, the “Information on the Hamas Charter” resource is an Instagram video in which a lady says she does not excuse Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, then goes on to excuse it by insisting Hamas is not antisemitic and does not hate Jews, but is simply fighting Zionism. A video about how Hamas is not antisemitic is not education. It is stupidity.
Also according to its website, “BIPOC USHR recognizes intertwined systems of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that actively work to undermine the overall well-being and achievements of BIPOC communities.” More nonsense. Economic evidence — notably the pioneering work of Gary Becker, which won him the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics — has shown capitalism and free markets reduce racism, not increase it.
