My Canada

There's a story out of Ottawa about a "sheltered workplace" that's about to close, throwing 50 developmentally handicapped adults out of work.

Sheltered workplaces used to be quite common. They were a means to give an otherwise severely marginalized population some sense of normality. However, they don't fit into the prevailing ethos of efficiency and all that stuff, and they have been closing up all over the place.

Apparently they require "subsidies" to remain viable, and in these tough economic times, we just can't afford subsidies all over the place.

So it's more efficient to just let those folks rot...

But apparently we can still afford juicy subsidies to gratuitous exercises in flag-waving, like the gifting of a $30 million dollar parcel of prime Ottawa real estate to a group that wants to furnish Ottawa's downtown with a memorial to the victims of communism.

Frankly, I think it should be the countries who were victimized by "communism" who should be putting up monuments to the victims of communism. The Ottawa project smells like blatant vote-grubbing to me, aimed at the Canadian voters who are descendants of those immigrants from countries like Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine who suffered mightily under the heel of Stalinism.

In my Canada, we would let the memorials rise in Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine.

That $30 million could be put into sheltered workshops for Canadians who need the support.