Here's how this "daycare plan" whitewash is really going to work: Low income earners won't be able to find care for the price of a daily Starbucks coffee. High income types will be able to transfer the bonus to their stay-at-home spouse, so people like you and me end up paying to raise the Rosedale crowd's kids. Meanwhile, middle-class families with two working parents will only see a fraction of the handout after it gets factored into their sky-high income taxes.

Adam Taylor of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation estimates that the real cost of daycare works out to more than $30 billion per year, and says that the Liberal policy to warehouse kids "has gun registry and Kyoto written all over it" in terms of disastrous spending.

While the Tory option allows for more parental choice, it's like putting a spoiler and mag wheels on a Ford Pinto. Politicians need to get out of the child-rearing business entirely, and leave it to the parents who chose to have them.

A real conservative would lower taxes significantly so people can spend or invest more of their own money as they see fit -- on child care or otherwise. Reagan signed off on the biggest cut in U.S. history, while George W. Bush cut taxes four times in four years, calling it "the agenda of a government that knows its limits and shows its heart."

Speaking of not knowing one's limits, here in Canada, the Liberals have been binging like drunks at last call. They've spent the last decade rifling through our wallets, and the last thing we need now is for the Conservatives to step in, take out a few more bills, and hand them over to the little brats of some couple in Forest Hill.

And before someone trots out the tired argument that by cutting government bloat, conservatives will have people dying in the streets, let me ask: Do you really think this country and its people are that pathetic?

I'm all for having a great social safety net -- for those who actually need it. And like in America, people should have to work for their free handout, not just sit at home watching Oprah. I choose to think that Canada can do better than this. Too bad we don't seem to have a single federal party leader who thinks likewise.