Corpun file 20306

Winnipeg Sun, Manitoba, 21 June 2008

Kill this 'Nanny State' bill

By Joseph Quesnel

Canada's Liberal-dominated Senate wants to turn my parents into criminals and I don't appreciate it.

This past week, legislation criminalizing parents who use reasonable corporal punishment on their children passed through the Senate. Hopefully, this Nanny State initiative will die in the House of Commons.

I don't know what it is with starry-eyed liberal reformers who believe abolishing spanking will produce a violence-free utopia.

It clearly has not changed anything in schools. School boards across this country abolished corporal punishment decades ago and it has emboldened some of the worst behaved students. I will not argue there is a causal link between banning the strap and increased violence in our schools, but it sure is coincidental both have risen together. When I was young, I could expect a hand or a belt to greet me if I committed offences against the law and order in our home. I also remember receiving light slaps on the bottom at school for tormenting others. In my mind, it was a way of differentiating whom [sic] was in charge and what was right and wrong.

Utopian education reformers and sociology professors try to make dubious arguments linking physical discipline and general violence. It creates a spiral in society, they claim, where people learn it is OK to hit others because they were struck themselves. This claim cannot be empirically proven and nor does it make the critical distinction between lawfully-executed discipline and assault or child abuse. The difference is in the motive and identity of the person doing it. It is as basic as why we allow courts to jail people against their will. They have done something that warrants coercion.

The argument made by "children's advocates" (read: professional baby snatchers) is that parents use the Criminal Code exemption for corporal punishment to shield child abuse. Sadly, this does happen. Some parents do, unfortunately, interpret the right to strike too broadly and smack their kids when they are angry or simply because they do not like their face.

This allows sociologists to paint all parents with the same brush. Parents who spank sparingly and with the motive of correction are lumped in with parents who burn their children with cigarettes or break bones. Like obscenity, I think most people know abuse when they see it. In 2004, the Supreme Court upheld the right of parents to use reasonable force in disciplining children. It laid down guidelines, ruling that children under two years and teenagers were not to be spanked, and that objects were out of the question. During the hearings, Justice Charles Gonthier said repealing Section 43 could make parents liable to criminal charges each time they spanked their children.

This recent bill adopted by the Senate allows parents or teachers to use "reasonable force other than corporal punishment, but only in three specific circumstances: preventing or minimizing harm to the child or another person, preventing the child from engaging in conduct of a criminal nature, or preventing the child from engaging in excessively offensive or disruptive behaviour."

But, who will enforce this? Will parents need to create a checklist every time they think of using any force on their children? These important elements always escape the mind of the utopian reformer.

Copyright © 2007, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.

Corpun file 20347

Telegraph-Journal, St John, New Brunswick, 26 June 2008

At Large

Anti-spanking lunatics are BaaaaaCk!

By Charles Moore

Four years ago, in a commentary on the Supreme Court's 2004 6-3 majority ruling upholding Section 43 of the Criminal Code - the "spanking law-" I opined: "I think we can safely assume this one has been settled for the foreseeable future." I was overly optimistic.

Last Tuesday, a bill spearheaded by dogged Liberal "children's rights" nut-job Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette passed final reading in the Senate, proving at least two things. First, never mind "sober second thought," a majority of current senators have demonstrated themselves incapable of sober first thought. Secondly, it's time for Prime Minister Harper to put his campaign for structural Senate reform (commendable in principle) on hold and get on with some functional Senate reform by appointing small-c conservative-minded members to the Upper House while he has the opportunity.

Hervieux-Payette's bill would, if it makes it through Parliament, strike down Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which provides that any parent, schoolteacher or parental authority "is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child" over the age of two and under 13- years old, "if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances," which, as the Canadian Bar Association noted during Senate committee hearings, would criminalize parents and teachers for exercising traditional forms of corrective discipline on offspring and charges.

Fortunately on this misbegotten piece of legislation Parliament will be the instrument of second thought, and sober or otherwise, parliamentarians operate under the reality constraint of accountability to voters, which should help temper political-correctness lunacy among the opposition. Reportedly Stephen Harper will make it a free vote, cost-free for him as I doubt any Conservative MPs would support Hervieux-Payette's bill anyway, and hopefully enough opposition members will be amenable to common sense to handily defeat it.

Surveys indicating some 80 per cent of Canadians support retention of spanking should help impose some degree of sobriety on deliberations.

I mean, given the increasing mayhem and anarchy being wreaked on our society by out-of-control young offenders, how can anyone with half a brain possibly imagine that we need less, rather than more, youth discipline? Criminy! - what are the nitwits that propelled this bill through the Senate thinking? Perhaps "thinking" excessively dignifies their mental processes.

Certainly, guidelines prescribed in the Supreme Court's decision place plenty enough legal inhibition on physical discipline. Corporal punishment of children under age two is probably useless, and of teenagers possibly counterproductive, and hitting a child of any age in the head or face can't be justified.

Prohibition of parents using instruments other than the open hand to administer corporal discipline isn't a point I would go to the wall on either, interpreting the Bible's "spare the rod and spoil the child" admonition as partly metaphorical, although accurate in principle. The high court's proviso that discipline must be for "educational" or "corrective" purposes only and not motivated by "anger" or "frustration" is idealistically high-minded, but probably more than a little unlikely in certain real-world situations.

I'm no enthusiast for hitting people, especially little kids, but I reluctantly spanked my own children on rare occasions, likely countable on fingers of the hand of administration, only as a last resort, but there were times when it was the right thing to do.

Where I radically parted company with the majority justices (and certainly the dissenting minority) in 2004 was on the matter of corporal punishment in schools. Effectively, they banned it, while I strongly advocate restoration, and not just for students under 13.

During my schooldays 40-50 years ago, a regulation "strap" resided in a desk drawer of every classroom. Frequency of employment varied from teacher to teacher, but when every student was conscious of its ominous presence, schools were much, more orderly, disciplined, and civilized compared with the near-anarchy that prevails nowadays.

As former Supreme Court judge Madame Justice L'Heureux-Dubé affirmed sensibly on this issue:

"The ideological notion that striking a child can't be justified under ANY circumstances, contradicts of thousands of years of parenting experience, and assertions that corporal punishment teaches violent behavior fly in the face of historical fact that when spanking was used much more liberally than it is today, levels of social violence were far lower."

Too true. While the meltdown of discipline and civility in schools can't entirely, or even predominantly, be attributed to removal of the strap (the primary culprit has been the imposition of general lefty social sciences quackery), elimination of corporal punishment has undoubtedly been a factor, and if Hervieux-Payette's bill ever passes into law, there will be literal hell to pay both in families and society in general.

Something to impress on your MP over the summer.

Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotia based freelance writer and editor. His column appears each Thursday.

Other months for domestic CP in Canada:
November 1998
February 1999
June 1999
October 1999
December 1999
February 2000
July 2000
July 2001
August 2001
September 2001
January 2002
February 2002
May 2002
June 2002
July 2002
December 2002
June 2003
October 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
February 2005
March 2005
December 2005
April 2007