Dumb mouths, that ope' their ruby lips

The other Harperite perversity on ample display this week has been vicious, short-sighted, destructive policy petulance. The cuts to the Canada Summer Jobs program are a prime example.

Heard about this? Like the Court Challenges Program, like the Status of Women Office, like the money for museums, Canada Summer Jobs doesn't cost, in the grand scheme of things, a whole lot - it subsidizes/funds temporary positions for high school and university students in organisations that wouldn't otherwise be able to hire over ther summer. So why has $11 million been axed from its budget? Disabled little league baseball; an award-winning camp for autistic kids; daycamps in Jamestown - none of these things are apparently "worthy" enough, to quote Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg, to qualify.

While the fracas in the House is bad, this is reprehensible. Paul Wells thinks that the Conservatives are preparing a grand new human capital strategy. Well, denying young people in urban areas home to 80% of Canada's population, not to mention all of Newfoundland, summer job opportunities - and money, experience, skills development and the chance to innovate - is really such an outstandingly original way to develop a workforce, isn't it?

Harper knows that with a minority government, he can't chop away at some of the bigger strands of the social safety net. But it's open season on the small fry - and I bet you a $1.3 billion tank purchase that the Primer Minister thinks it will be easier to do away with the big stuff by softening up the victim with a thousand cuts.

Cuts, cuts, cuts. Cuts to the regulation of prime-time television commercials. Cuts to the Official Languages Plan. That holy shibboleth, tax cuts. Students, and everyone else, might want to bone up on their Classics - Canada has become like a man who goes in for a hair cut and is instead attacked with the shears. Or like Caeser stabbed in the back, by a fat man with a lean and hungry look.