Stephen Harper’s Procreation Awards or: Is the Prime Minister a Goddamn Anarchist?

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

If you own one or more babies, you probably just made some serious coin.

That's because the Canadian prime minister decided to pay people based on how many offspring they can pump out and/or acquire.

You may already be aware of this, because the government won't shut the fuck up about it.

Over the past few months, Conservative wunderkind and jobs minister Pierre Poilievre has skulked around the country, searching for families not signed up for the Universal Child Care Benefit like he's playing the world's lamest game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, tagging it all with #YourKidsYourWay, which sounds like a demented advertising campaign for cannibalism.

ICYMI @Justin_Ling I'm back on the search today – this time in Saskatoon. Working to sign up 2600 families for #UCCB. pic.twitter.com/MujP6FKJYn
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) May 29, 2015

The UCCB, a.k.a. the First Annual Stephen Harper Procreation Award, rewards families with a cash prize. That started in 2006, at $100 [$77 USD] a month for each humanoid investment you parent under the age of six. Recently, the government announced that it was upping that amount to $160 [$125 USD] for the toddlers, and chipping in an additional $60 [$46 USD] per kid aged seven to 18. A bunch of that money was backloaded from January 1, meaning families are getting fistfulls of fuckmoney in their mailbox right about now.

That means your July babyprize is either $420 or $520 [$325 or $400 USD] per kid, regardless of your income and if you need it or not.

So let's say you're like the deranged sociopaths from 19 Kids and Counting, during season three (the best 19K&C season.) At that point, they had four children six years of age or younger, and ten who were between seven and 18. Because benefits from January to July are lumped into one fat check, that means if they were in Canada right now, they would get…

[math break]

$4,900 [$3,780].

Now you may be asking: "What? Why?"

And you would be right.

Say what you will about Stephen Harper, but the man knows what he is doing and doesn't really care how it looks.

His point of view hasn't drastically changed since he was elected: You give the government too much money, the government is sort-of terrible with money, here's a check for some money.

What has changed is that an election is in a couple of months and the government is sending people money in hopes that those people will vote Conservative. Which is gross.

The whole thing is going to cost about $2.5 billion [$1.9 billion USD] per year.

That $2.5 billion might seem crazy, especially as the Canadian economy coughs twice and keels over like an asthmatic horse, but the point of this program isn't practical, it's ideological, especially when report after report identifies chronically underfunded services like healthcare, or dangerously unsafe infrastructure like pretty much all of Montreal's bridges and tunnels.

Shocking as it may be to hear, the prime minister is the closest thing we've got to a radical anarchist as we're going to get in the Prime Minister's chair, and he's determined to take the bloated Canadian social state and turn it into a little tiny government. An itty-bitty government. A government so small it is staffed by adorable little mice.

To get there, Harper keeps grabbing things and selling them, kind of like a meth addict house-sitting his parents' place. If you don't bolt down the goddamn chairs, they'll probably wind up on Craigslist within a few days.

So you anarchists should be happy, because you have one of your own in office.

Yes, that means you, you Che Guevara-t-shirt-wearing 20-something with a questionably obtained medical marijuana license, dragging on a Djarum Black, and carrying a book of Emma Goldman essays that you half-read and quarter-understood. You should be signing up for the Conservative Party of Canada and giving them all your money, all $67 [$52] of it.

Because creating dedicated payments to individuals is the best way to bleed a government dry of its kitty and downgrade a full-staffed public service to an automated phone line that uses MIDI files of early 90s Bryan Adams slowjams as its hold music.

Both the NDP and Liberals have basically endorsed the whole thing—although the Liberals want to send more money back, but proportion it to families based on their income instead of just indiscriminately mailing out cheques to anyone with kids like they're coupons for Dominos. The NDP, though, also wants to create a big national daycare program that is supposed to offer families an affordable alternative to putting your kids up at the Ritz-Carlton while you're at work, or whatever they're doing now that costs, on average, between $500 and $1,700 a month [$385 and $1,310 USD] (except in Quebec, the archetype for the NDP's plan, where those costs are limited to $152 [$117]). That will be very expensive.

Part of the headache of all this is that, while sending people cash is politically gangbusters, it might not actually be good economics. Right now, jobs are being cut left and right as low growth, cheap oil, and a lack of investment are hobbling businesses across the country. Meanwhile, many families are actually squirreling away money at a relatively high rate. So taking money away from investment programs and giving it to the Canadian version of the Duggar Family and their cult-like baseball team of children might not actually be the smartest economic driver.

The program can't even really be lauded as much of a benefit for low-income families. At $25 [$19] a week for your kid's first six years of life, then $15 [$12] a week for the 11 years after that, it's hard to argue that the UCCB is really keeping families afloat. Raising the minimum wage, lowering the lowest marginal tax rate, reducing prescription drug costs, spurring job creation—all are almost certainly more effective ways to fight poverty and lift the lower and lower-middle income brackets.

Nevermind that the UCCB is taxable, meaning you don't even get to keep the whole damn thing.

But maybe, philosophically, you agree with a government that just paves roads, fights wars, takes care of sick people, and then sends all the money back to the hardworking population. Maybe you're one of those monsters with a "Don't steal, the government hates competition" bumper sticker. Or maybe you think the government is shit and, as such, it oughta stop trying to do things. If so, you should ask: why is it only families that are receiving this cash, regardless of how badly they actually need the money? Why isn't this money being sent back through tax cuts, which would probably do more to stimulate the economy at large?

The simple answer is that people who don't have kids aren't real people and should be used only as incubators for tax revenue that can subsidize the existence of families.

But thanks for coming out.

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