Making babies in Canada could result in nutjob nationalists

Given that it's part of the Asper Empire, I suppose we can't expect much of the Gazette, but this piece it published online yesterday, entitled "Making babies in Canada could save money", is particularly appalling.

Author Dianne Rinehart's premise is that our governments should invest in artificial reproductive technologies rather than immigration, because the latter costs $1.6 billion in "departmental and resettlement costs," and growth from immigration currently outnumbers domestic births by three to one.

The first thing that strikes me about the piece is the barely-contained fear that "real Canadians" will be outnumbered by immigrants. It rears its ugly head every time the author throws in a statistic about rising immigration numbers as a self-evidently bad thing. That concern is probably racist and certainly stupid: after all, everyone but our First Nations were immigrants to Canada at one time, and look how we treat the original inhabitants!

The economic argument, as well, is completely disingenuous, even if Rinehart had provided a cite for her dollar figure. Consider, if you will, the financial implications of waiting for Canadian babies to contribute to the domestic economy. The Canadian Council on Social Development estimated that in 2004 it cost families on average $166,000 to raise a Canadian infant from birth to age 18. I really can't see how it could possibly cost more than that to simply open the doors to foreign nationals, who are often already trained and very willing to go to work.

Furthermore, and with all due respect to struggling would-be parents, I have a real problem with invasive, espensive fertility treatments. For one thing, it seems foolish to go to such lengths to increase the population of a planet already bursting at the seams. We especially don't need more citizens of so-called first world countries who damage the environment disproportionately. Secondly, it bothers me that many people will stop at nothing to create of and for themselves a little genetic replicant. There are so many children that need someone to care for them, and I don't care if you pull a Brangelina and truck them in from far-flung locales, or head to your local Ministry of Children and Family Development office: there's just no need (unless you're a couple of geniuses trying to breed the next generation of cancer-curing scientists) to replicate biologically when it involves such ridiculous expense and limited success rates. My final complaint is that any R&D and other government funding that go towards developing newer and better fertility treatments are at the expense of more pressing medical concerns. As we all know, there are just not enough health care dollars to go around.

The kicker in the article at hand, and I'll quote the paragraph in full, is where Rinehart states the following (after explaining that artificial reproductive technology is a better use of health spending than palliative care or heart disease):

Finally, if it's all about money - and not about families - consider what
else New Scientist reported: The findings "concluded ART could be as effective
at increasing birth rates as other proposed policies, such as raising the level
of child benefit" and - wait for it - "but would cost less."

This is the most ass-backwards logic of all. It first requires us to accept, as I clearly haven't, that encouraging population growth via domestic birthrates is prima facie superior to encouraging immigration. Then, it suggests that because it costs less, government money is better spent on artificial insemination than on actually increasing child benefits to struggling families. What a brilliant idea! Forget helping the parents who are currently trying to raise their existing children with little to no assistance from the state....we should do biological backflips and get them to pop out some more!

The author dresses her elitist and xenophobic wolf of a position in the sheep's clothing of feminism (commiserating with women who are maligned for delaying pregnancy) and environmentalism (claiming, nonsensically, that immigration contributes to congestion and pollution, since most new residents head to the urban centres. In reality, city living is well documented to actually reduce environmental pressures, because people are more likely to live in smaller residences, to commute less to work, and to take advantage of the other ecological efficiencies that result from high population density.).

In reality, though, her proposed solution is just straight-up white supremacism of a particularly crazy brand, and that's pretty disturbing even given the Gazette's well-known biases.*


*Of which you're well aware, right Scottay? Maybe you shouldn't show them your portfolio...