Juno News - May 04, 2022


A real conversation about family policy in Canada


Episode Stats

Length

26 minutes

Words per Minute

191.3432

Word Count

5,125

Sentence Count

214

Misogynist Sentences

30

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Canadians need to start having more kids. We shouldn't be shy about that fact. We should all
00:00:04.500 be more pro-family, pro-kids, and pro-mothers. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:21.220 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. So as you saw in recent weeks
00:00:26.340 and months and with the budget being rolled out by the Trudeau Liberals, part of what they've
00:00:29.980 announced is that they've reached a deal with all of the provinces to introduce a $10 per day
00:00:35.280 child care program. This is modeled after the Quebec public daycare program. So we now have
00:00:40.640 government daycares all over the country rolling out. Many people are celebrating this fact. Many
00:00:45.620 people even on the right are excited about the idea that more mothers will be able to get back into the
00:00:50.560 workforce and that they will have a place to put their kids. It may even encourage families to have
00:00:55.020 more kids. I found this incredibly arrogant. Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister in the
00:01:00.680 House of Commons, called this policy women's liberation, an example of feminist policy in
00:01:07.480 action. So I want to quickly play that clip for you. Here it is.
00:01:11.900 We have now signed agreements on early learning and child care with every single province and
00:01:19.460 territory in our great country. This is women's liberation. It will mean more women no longer
00:01:27.340 need to choose between motherhood.
00:01:29.560 This is feminist economic policy in action, and it will make life more affordable for middle-class
00:01:45.080 Canadian families. So Chrystia Freeland very boldly says that women will no longer have to choose
00:01:51.140 between having a family or having a career, as if that is really the major struggle that women
00:01:56.840 in today's world have. Well, someone who writes about this issue and speaks very clearly on it
00:02:02.560 is Ginny Ross. So I wanted to invite her on the podcast today to discuss it. Ginny is the vice
00:02:07.940 president at Crestview Strategy. She's worked at Queen's Park, was a party organizer for the Progressive
00:02:13.060 Conservative Party of Ontario, and has been a lifelong political activist. She's a contributor
00:02:17.380 over at The Hub. She writes occasionally for The National Post and is a frequent panelist
00:02:22.300 on television and radio outlets. Ginny, it's great to have you on the program.
00:02:26.500 Thanks, Candace.
00:02:27.800 So, well, first, I just want to get your quick reaction on the government, $10 a day government
00:02:33.680 daycare, whether you think that that will, as Chrystia Freeland claims, sort of solve women's
00:02:39.820 liberation and allow women to have it all, have both a family and a career, as so many
00:02:45.060 women struggle with.
00:02:47.040 Yeah, I mean, I find it offensive on a number of fronts, and maybe it's worth going through
00:02:52.320 them, because I think they're all important. One is, well, first, there's the policy matter,
00:02:57.600 which is, will the program even work? Like, will there actually be all these new childcare
00:03:02.480 spaces that are affordable for people with different incomes across Canada? And I think we have all
00:03:07.520 of the reasons to be skeptical of that. If you look at the Quebec model that they're trying to
00:03:12.140 imitate or bring across the country, there's massive wait lists for it. It's hurt people who want a
00:03:19.660 different option for childcare and can't go with the nine to five because they work different hours,
00:03:24.120 maybe they're a shift worker, whatever, so there's almost no flexibility. The actual program itself,
00:03:29.060 there have been studies that the outcome for children are great. There are all sorts of reasons
00:03:34.020 by public policy, even if you believe that it will increase flexible childcare, which I don't.
00:03:40.960 Her comments around the premise of, first of all, women's liberation, I mean, I think most women in
00:03:47.380 Canada feel pretty liberated. I don't know that people feel there's like an academic epidemic of
00:03:53.080 women being held down by public policy in Canada. Second of all, and it's sort of the same point,
00:04:00.480 I think, you know, you and I both, I won't speak for my husband. I follow your husband. I know a lot
00:04:06.980 of other men who are really active in their kids' lives who also want better childcare options. Like,
00:04:12.940 it's a very strange thing to make this about women when in a lot of cases, you have parents who are
00:04:19.560 making choices about their lives, who want more flexibility, who want more options. And yes, maybe
00:04:24.320 they both want to pursue careers and have a way of having their children cared for while they work.
00:04:30.600 But what does that say about those men who are really active, in many cases, in their kids' lives
00:04:35.940 that childcare doesn't have anything to do with them, seemingly, according to the federal finance
00:04:40.120 minister? So, I mean, I could go on, but there are so many ways that I find that a problematic comment
00:04:46.080 from her relative to the program.
00:04:47.700 Yeah. And it's funny, too, because I talked to a lot of my female friends about this, the idea that,
00:04:52.860 you know, women can have it all. We can have successful careers that are meaningful and
00:04:57.620 fulfilling. And we can also have these meaningful, fulfilling family lives with a great support of
00:05:02.960 husbands and children. And it's sort of a paradox, because when you become a parent, you realize that
00:05:07.740 your time is limited. And so the actual struggle is, where do you want to put your time? Do you want
00:05:13.440 to spend more of your time in a day job that you might not even get a lot of satisfaction from,
00:05:18.400 you might not even love? And you're forgoing time with your children, these, like, incredibly important
00:05:23.140 fleeting moments where they're learning to talk and speak and walk and all these milestones.
00:05:29.540 And so this idea that, oh, the government solved the problem, all you have to do is just drop your
00:05:33.440 kid off at some government daycare, and voila, like, your life will be happy. It's insulting. And even
00:05:40.400 more so to your point that it excludes men from the conversation, because it's expected that men
00:05:46.420 are going to be working and that it's women that have to make this struggle. I want to ask you about
00:05:52.620 a piece that you wrote over at The Hub. I thought it was really interesting. You said, don't be shy
00:05:56.760 about it. Family values and babies are good things. You talked a little bit about how there's a
00:06:00.820 revitalization, particularly on the right, with natalism and people having more conversations about how we
00:06:06.860 need to have more kids, we should have more kids, and we shouldn't be shy about it. But how elite
00:06:11.480 opinion sort of, you know, the experts don't want to talk about it because it's our key and it's
00:06:16.760 personal. What made you want to champion this issue? And what makes you so confident and brave
00:06:24.600 to go out there and speak about it?
00:06:26.700 I was sort of triggered by a series of Paul Kornman tweets that I mentioned in the story,
00:06:32.880 and people should check it out. But it was sort of this analysis that, and I think this is true of
00:06:39.120 lots of sort of like centrist thinkers, of which most economists would consider themselves centrist,
00:06:43.140 I think, or maybe left of center, and liberals, who think that the only thing that matters when it
00:06:52.180 comes to families and their size are sort of like economic measures, and this question of like,
00:06:56.980 people in the workforce, and that, because we've now put women in the workforce, that means we have
00:07:02.260 equality, or we're trying to achieve equality, therefore, birth rates have dropped, and that's, that
00:07:06.740 makes it okay. And the only people, according to Krugman, who want to see birth rates go up are people
00:07:12.740 who are religious, you know, God forbid. So, so I, my reaction to that was just so visceral, because I had
00:07:21.940 in following this issue noticed that, actually, there are some really strong demographers who've
00:07:26.420 studied the issue in great, great detail, and no one has a perfect answer to why birth rates are
00:07:30.500 dropping basically all over the world. But what we do know is that when you ask people, they want to
00:07:37.060 have more kids than they're having. And that includes women, it's especially true of women. To an earlier
00:07:41.940 point you were making, many women would choose to stay home, many people would choose to stay home if
00:07:46.740 they could, if they could afford to, if they could have a single family home. There's a candidate for Senate
00:07:51.860 in Arizona right now named Blake Masters, who's running on this premise of imagine if you could
00:07:56.340 support a family on one income. And I think what he does with his political messaging is really smart
00:08:02.660 and correct. Part of what I tried to do in my column, which is, we don't need to choose between an
00:08:08.100 economic policy solution or a social policy solution. It's both, right, our culture and our social
00:08:14.260 environment, which dictate the public policy choices we make, are what impact these kinds of big macro
00:08:21.060 trends. And if we think that people aren't having enough kids, which I think we can all agree that
00:08:26.020 the goal of plug policy is to give people better, more fulfilled, happier lives, and they're telling
00:08:30.420 us in surveys they want more kids than they're having, there's obviously a problem there. And what he
00:08:35.220 gets at with his, with his messaging is maybe there's a, maybe there's a cost of living challenge.
00:08:41.220 Maybe there's, I mean, in Canada, we know inflation is a big problem. We know people can, in many cases,
00:08:46.260 parents are choosing not to buy beef at the grocery store right now because groceries are
00:08:50.820 so expensive. They're, they're opting out to fill their car with gas. And so those material challenges,
00:08:56.260 plus a culture that is telling women that they're not fulfilling their duty unless they're working
00:09:01.620 for some sort of feminist cause, I think those things are starting to pile up and they're starting
00:09:05.620 to really influence the choices people are making. And ultimately people are making choices they're not
00:09:09.700 happy with, and they're having fewer kids. And by the time they decide they maybe want to have more,
00:09:14.900 they're disappointed in that it's too late because there are imperatives we don't like to talk about,
00:09:18.420 biological imperatives we don't like to talk about because it's uncomfortable. But I, but I think we
00:09:22.820 should because if people aren't achieving their desired birth rate, that's a problem for their
00:09:27.620 happiness and their fulfillment and for society. Well, you can look at surveys tracking women's
00:09:34.420 happiness in particular. I mean, across society, our society is becoming less and less happy and
00:09:38.900 fulfilled self-reporting, but women in particular is gone down, you know, markedly. And I know
00:09:45.700 for my generation, it was like, you go to college, get a career, exactly what you're saying,
00:09:49.620 women's liberation, it's like your duty to go out and and put career first. And then you get to the
00:09:54.500 point where you're like, well, you know, I've gone to university, I've put all this energy and investment
00:09:59.460 into my career, I need to go fulfill that. And I know that so many women that go off and find careers that
00:10:06.340 they hate and then they're unhappy with and you know, really high, high level, high achieving people,
00:10:10.820 lawyers, doctors, those kinds of things, and realize it's not really what they want. So
00:10:16.020 fundamentally, I think it is cultural, but there is that economic component. I hear more and more
00:10:22.820 conservatives talking about how the Canada needs to get to a place where a family can survive on
00:10:27.780 one income. That seems so foreign, especially in a city like Toronto, where I think the average
00:10:32.420 home is now like $2 million or something like that. So so many families are working so hard with two
00:10:37.940 incomes, just to save up to buy a house or, you know, to the point you're making these crazy times
00:10:43.300 with inflation, buying gas and buying meat. I mean, I think a lot of people put off childhood,
00:10:50.740 having kids, motherhood, parenthood, because they can't afford it, or they think they need
00:10:55.060 those two incomes. So what do you do you think we're just beyond the point now where
00:11:00.020 a single single income household can can sustain? I mean, I grew up in a household where my dad worked,
00:11:05.540 and my mom was a stay at home mom, and she never had a job. And that was kind of the norm in my community
00:11:10.580 in Vancouver, I guess, in the 80s and 90s. It doesn't seem like anyone does that anymore.
00:11:15.300 Every every family I know, every couple I know has a working two working spouses or two working
00:11:20.980 parents. Do you think we can get back to that that place where we have an economy where you only need
00:11:25.540 one income to survive? I do. It seems a long way off. I mean, to your point, I think there are many
00:11:31.540 people with two incomes who can't afford a home level of one. But I think it's a lot of goal. And I think
00:11:36.500 more importantly, we need to discipline the public conversation around this issue. I think the vast
00:11:41.780 majority of people who speak publicly on public policy would say, well, the federal government,
00:11:48.340 especially by governments in general, just can't impact something like a birth rate, it's too hard.
00:11:54.180 There are social policy is, is really narrow, and it's the purview of local governments at most,
00:12:00.420 but you know, we shouldn't be interfering in people's bedrooms and that kind of thing.
00:12:04.100 But I think we need to be more clear with people about the fact that economic policy,
00:12:10.420 like a policy, like, like, and they're all choices, by the way, like, the housing crisis
00:12:14.740 exists because of choices that politicians have made to favor and envy is, and people who want,
00:12:21.380 who don't want to see no homes built over people who are shut up at the housing market. That's choice.
00:12:26.020 A public policy makers make that choice every day. And, you know, you can apply that to all sorts of
00:12:29.780 of some of the policy choices that led to the inflation, inflationary situation we're in right
00:12:35.140 now, not just on homes, but on, but on other fronts. All of these public policy choices have
00:12:41.220 have implications. And I think that they are having an impact on on at least how open Canada
00:12:47.620 is as a country to or how encouraging Canada is the country to people to grow their families
00:12:52.580 and pursue their, their dreams that we know that they want. And so, so it does seem far off,
00:12:58.660 but I think it's possible. And I think our public, our body politic should pressure politicians to,
00:13:04.980 to try to speak to that. And I think politicians who are trying to speak to that are going to find
00:13:09.460 that it's fertile ground for them politically, because they're going to speak to people who,
00:13:14.980 who have been making certain choices about their lives, because they think politicians don't have
00:13:18.980 answers. And all of a sudden they'll realize actually there may be public policy that could
00:13:22.580 change this. If I could all of a sudden afford a house, maybe I'd have a second kit, maybe a third
00:13:26.820 kit. Absolutely. And, you know, it's definitely intertwined there. Are there any examples of
00:13:33.300 pro family, pro natal policies around the world that have worked? I just anecdotally, I was in Singapore
00:13:38.820 like 10 years ago, and they had this like weird campaign where they were trying to encourage
00:13:43.540 people to have babies and they had like kind of almost creepy billboards up. I think they had
00:13:48.420 like a national date night or something where they were like encouraging parents to go out and go on
00:13:52.660 dates and make babies essentially. I don't know if that was actually successful or not. I'm wondering
00:13:57.220 if you've looked into this at all and if you know of any. Most demographers are pretty agreed that these
00:14:02.580 kind of experiments aren't working very well. The one exception at Outlier is Hungary, which, you know,
00:14:09.860 people on the right of center know Hungary is this kind of like nationalist, really, you know,
00:14:15.220 right wing government. That's sort of like the example of a right wing nationalist government
00:14:21.940 really pushing forward lots of public policy, new public policy in the last, say, five, 10 years,
00:14:26.820 five years, certainly. And they have actually increased their birth rate and they're like very
00:14:30.820 explicit about you. You basically pay no taxes if you have more than like four or five kids in Hungary.
00:14:36.260 They've made it, they've chosen to really like lower the burden and try to incentivize through financial
00:14:40.820 means people having kids and it has made a bit of a difference. So it is possible. That's a pretty,
00:14:47.780 that's a pretty like blunt instrument. I think that whether or not you get the results you want,
00:14:54.340 I still think the public policy choices we make and the way leaders talk culturally about what's
00:14:59.940 important and what's not matters and send signals to people. You know, I'll jump back really quickly to
00:15:06.260 a point you were making about what it was like for art. I think we were from a similar generation
00:15:11.540 growing up. And for me, for my generation growing up in a pretty atheistic urban environment,
00:15:19.460 it was just not viewed as something that a young woman should want to grow a family and to have kids.
00:15:27.300 And I think you're now seeing a trend of frankly, like a business market for the fertility industry,
00:15:35.300 not just the obvious medical interventions to try to increase people's fertility, which they should
00:15:40.980 obviously pursue, but like devices even to track your ability to get pregnant later in life and
00:15:49.460 this whole marketplace of capitalizing on women who in their mid or late 30s are choosing to have kids.
00:15:58.180 And it's great that they are, but in many cases, I think certainly anecdotally,
00:16:01.860 you're starting to hear people who, women, who didn't really quite realize that the choices they've
00:16:07.300 made would mean that their childbearing mode would be delayed and then tougher and that it may
00:16:11.540 be, may not be possible for them to have the big families that they want. And I think that's a bit
00:16:16.820 of a failure on the public policy front too. If we're, if we've created a public health education
00:16:22.100 environment where women don't know what their most fertile years are, it's uncomfortable to talk about,
00:16:27.140 but I think that's a problem. And I think we owe it to people to make sure they have all the
00:16:30.020 information they need to make the best possible choice. They should have better material,
00:16:34.180 economic circumstances, better information, and they should feel like they can make the best
00:16:38.740 possible choice to pursue a happy end that they see for themselves.
00:16:43.540 Well, just again, speaking anecdotally from like my friend group, it seems like everyone focused so
00:16:48.740 much on education and career development in their twenties and then thirties was a time that they
00:16:53.060 started having kids. And you know, it's just objectively harder to have kids when you're in your thirties
00:16:58.980 because you're a little bit older. And, and, you know, you talk about all of these devices,
00:17:03.620 you can track your ovulation cycles and that kind of thing. There's also been a huge boom in IVF
00:17:09.540 treatments. I know in Ontario it's paid for by the government, but they're still privately run and
00:17:14.020 there's clinics kind of popping up everywhere because so many people kind of, again, just didn't
00:17:19.300 realize how difficult it might be to have children in their thirties. I know, again, just from my group of
00:17:25.220 friends, some families that have struggled with that and struggled to have kids and end up going
00:17:29.700 the adoption route. You know, I see some hope because I have some friends that are also in
00:17:34.660 their twenties and some colleagues and I see them having kids earlier. And it's sort of, to me,
00:17:40.900 reassuring that maybe that messaging has changed a little bit, although I don't know if that's just
00:17:44.740 very niche and that most, most women are continuing on that same path of focusing on career in their
00:17:51.860 twenties and then trying to have a family in their thirties. I wonder in Canada, I have another friend
00:17:59.620 from Denmark and she's talking about how they get paid to have kids. The government actually gives them
00:18:04.180 like a bonus. And this idea of like, maybe if you have a big family, you shouldn't pay income taxes
00:18:09.140 or you should have a different tax structure. Do you think that something like that could work in
00:18:14.340 Canada? And do you see anyone talking about it? I know there's a conservative leadership race going
00:18:18.980 on right now, or any of the candidates talking about it? Is this something that you've heard come up at
00:18:23.140 all? I mean, it kind of exists in Canada. This was a Stephen Harper policy innovation that the liberals
00:18:30.260 have actually continued. They don't talk about it a lot, but Stephen Harper came up with sending parents
00:18:35.860 checks in the mail as a way. And frankly, it was in response to the liberal sort of cradle to grave,
00:18:42.740 the only option we can dream of to encourage people to have kids is to sort of institutionalize
00:18:48.100 childcare. You know, and infamously when Stephen Harper first floated the idea of people giving back
00:18:55.780 cash to parents instead to make their own choices to spend, you know, to maybe give to a grandparent to
00:19:00.420 care for the kid, to subsidize the grandparent's income or to a neighbor or to defray the
00:19:05.620 cost of staying home for a stay-at-home parent. A liberal strategist infamously said people would
00:19:10.660 spend it on beer and popcorn, which I think tells you everything you need to know about liberals
00:19:15.860 thinking people can better spend their own money. But actually, American demographers look to the
00:19:22.820 Harper example as something that can work. And Biden did something similar very recently, like near the
00:19:29.940 tail end of COVID. As part of his stimulus, a big part of it was, and he worked with Mitt Romney and
00:19:35.780 other right of center legislators in the US to send people cash, people who were either pregnant and
00:19:43.060 expecting a child or who had a young child at home as a way of kind of encouraging people to and rewarding
00:19:49.940 people for making that choice in the context of COVID. And rewarding is the wrong word, more like not
00:19:56.820 penalizing them for making that choice or removing the penalty and making it a bit easier. I have
00:20:02.020 also the commentary on Biden stimulus spending, which I think is part of the problem with inflation, but
00:20:06.580 it is clear that there was a little mini baby boom after those checks were delivered because it gave
00:20:12.260 people a bit of material comfort that, you know, coming out of COVID, they might be able to afford to
00:20:17.540 make that choice to have that baby. And so, and this is consistent with what demographers have found,
00:20:23.860 which is that material support can help a little bit, but not all the way. There are other cultural
00:20:29.700 factors at play. And if you can defray some of the cost or give some people some money back in their
00:20:35.860 pocket to feel like it will be such a penalty to have a kid. And that's really what it is, removing
00:20:40.420 the penalty of having a kid. It can make a difference. There is still this persistent challenge of dropping
00:20:47.460 birth rates in most Western countries around the world. And that extra gap, that extra cultural gap,
00:20:53.540 most people attribute to like declining religiosity, increased workism, as they call it, which is
00:20:58.900 sort of like what you described, this fixation on building your career before you have kids.
00:21:03.860 And I think that to the point of my column, I think that has to be addressed by culture,
00:21:10.020 by leaders encouraging people to pursue the way of life that they want. But the material can help,
00:21:16.500 it can make a difference at the margins.
00:21:17.860 Amy Quinton It's interesting that Biden took a sort of a page from
00:21:21.620 Harper, although it's interesting just to note that so Harper introduced the child care benefit
00:21:26.660 as an alternative to government daycare, Trudeau kept it and expanded it. And then in addition,
00:21:31.460 also brought in government daycare. So we now have two policy solutions trying to address the same
00:21:36.180 problem. I've always been interested in this sort of difference between the Canadian model and the
00:21:39.940 American model, because it's sort of an experiment playing out in real time. And my sister lives in the US,
00:21:45.140 I've got a bunch of friends down there. And it's really interesting, because most companies don't
00:21:49.860 give extended maternity leave, the government doesn't mandate it. I have so many friends that
00:21:55.940 literally six weeks after the baby is born, and they're back at their desk. And, you know,
00:22:00.100 for anyone who's been around a six week old baby, that's kind of shocking that that's what mothers do.
00:22:04.660 But what I find in the US is that it's much more binary, like so many women just don't go back to
00:22:09.300 work. It's just that's the decision once they start having kids, it's like, they're unwilling to go back to
00:22:13.300 work because they're not going to go back that early. And they don't like the options. Whereas
00:22:16.980 in Canada, we have this very generous year long maternity leave program. And it's great for moms,
00:22:23.700 they don't have to worry about it. Some of them even take longer, I think some government jobs,
00:22:27.940 you can take up to two years or up to a year and a half, and they hold your position, which seems on
00:22:32.020 the surface very pro mother pro family. But then you get to the problem where, you know, the child is two
00:22:38.260 and three. And, you know, the mother feels the need to go back to her career, she's want to lose
00:22:42.580 that job. But then at the same time, there's not a good place to leave the kid. And I guess that's
00:22:46.580 the solution that Chrysia Freeland and Trudeau are are touting here. I'm just wondering, as someone
00:22:53.700 who spends time thinking about this, do you think the Canadian model is objectively better? Or do you
00:22:59.060 think that that perhaps there's problems with it that we don't see? Because we like to think of
00:23:03.540 ourselves as more generous and more in this regard pro mother, but I don't know if necessarily that's
00:23:08.500 the case. And I think the US still has higher birth rates than Canada does.
00:23:12.180 Yeah, I don't know that it's better from a direct birth rate perspective. I think it's better
00:23:19.300 if your goal and I think this is my goal is to get to a greater neutrality that doesn't penalize
00:23:25.140 parents for choosing to stay home. Because the longer the leave you offer to a point, the more I
00:23:33.060 think people feel like they don't have to make that binary choice so early in a in a baby's life.
00:23:37.700 And I think that's good. I think that's like a good in and of itself. And I think it plays out
00:23:42.420 in positive ways in Canada. But what the problem comes when you have legislators using the kind of
00:23:48.180 language Freeland did, where you start to talk about like the moralism of women going back to work
00:23:53.700 every single instance, or parents going back to work in every single instance, because it starts to
00:23:59.700 creep into public policy decision making that the goal isn't to give people choice or flexibility or
00:24:05.460 to be neutral about childbearing. The public policy goal is to get as many people working as possible,
00:24:12.660 because people are just, you know, GDP contributing units of economic input. And that is the true end of
00:24:20.340 gender equality. That is when I start to get really uncomfortable. And I worry that constant enhancements
00:24:26.820 and fixation on cradle to grave childcare policy are in pursuit of that end, as opposed to the end of
00:24:38.420 women and men and parents in general making the best choice for their family and for what's going
00:24:43.860 to make them the happiest and contribute the most to like a thriving society and culture in Canada.
00:24:49.300 Well, it reminds me of another piece you had in The Hub last year, where you were talking about
00:24:53.780 conservatives. And you wrote this a conservative feminism should drop labor force participation as
00:24:58.980 the only measure of gender equality, you argued that the liberal approach has failed and that not
00:25:03.540 all women are interested in full time work, nor is it best for their families. So just final question
00:25:09.220 for you, can you can you elaborate? And how do you think conservative feminism if you want to use that
00:25:14.420 term? What should focus on instead instead of labor force equality?
00:25:18.740 I mean, I think I'll repeat myself a little bit just to say that I think it should focus on
00:25:25.220 women having true the true choices to contribute to their families, society and the workplace in the
00:25:31.700 way that I think they think is best. I think our I think our society should reward caring work,
00:25:38.740 whether that's caring for older people and seniors or babies and kids, or just each other. Whether that's
00:25:47.940 caring for your own kids or caring for someone else's kids, which often those kind of flexible your
00:25:53.220 neighbor caring for your kids. Often those people are women, and they're not rewarded by a child
00:25:58.900 care cradle to grave, you know, institutional child care system. And so and I think it's okay that
00:26:05.620 women for whatever reason, choose some of those caring roles in society more often than men do.
00:26:11.300 I think conservative feminism looks like a public policy environment that doesn't penalize women for
00:26:17.140 making choices that they think are best for themselves and their families. And I don't
00:26:21.460 think the liberal policy framework does that. Well, Ginny, I really appreciate you coming on
00:26:26.020 the show. There's so many interesting areas when it comes to family policy that don't get the proper
00:26:32.820 attention in the media and in society. So it's great to have this conversation. Hopefully we can
00:26:37.220 start having more and more of these kinds of conversations because it's so important. So I really
00:26:40.820 appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on True North. Thanks, Candice. All right, that's Ginny Roth. I'm
00:26:45.060 Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.