June 17, 2009

It's Wednesday, June 17th.

The NHL's Deputy Commissioner says the league is committed to finding an owner who will keep the Phoenix Coyotes in Phoenix.

Currently, And if it comes to it, he will personally go to all four corners of this flat earth to find one ... except Hamilton.

This is The Current.

All-Day Kindergarten

This week, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a plan to launch a full-day, fully funded and fully integrated child-care and kindergarten program and to do it starting in 2010.

If the program goes ahead, it would be the most far-reaching of its kind in Canada. And it has caught the attention of parents throughout the province, and beyond. We aired a clip of two parents weighing in on the proposed all-day child-care and kindergarten program in Ontario.

It's the kind of program that many early childhood educators have been pleading for. But not everyone agrees that it's the best option for children or for taxpayers.

For their thoughts on the proposal, we were joined by three people. Charles Pascal is the Executive Director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation and the Special Advisor on Early Learning for Ontario. It was his report that proposed the program and he was in Toronto. Susan Prentice is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. She has studied the economic impact of childcare and is the co-author of About Canada: Childcare. She was in Winnipeg. And Gabor Mate is a physician and the co-author of Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers. He was in Prince George, British Columbia.

Cruelty

Most of us would like to believe that cruelty is for others ... the sort of thing best left to psychopaths or genocidal warlords and the kind of thing we might not even be capable of.

But according to Kathleen Taylor, we'd be wrong about that. In fact, she argues that if we have any hope of curtailing such behaviour - we must recognize our own capacity for cruelty.

Kathleen Taylor joins a long list of people - including scientists, philosophers and theologians - in trying to understand what cruelty is. She is a neuroscientist and a research visitor in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford. She's also the author of the new book, Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain. And she was in Oxford, England.

Female Happiness

We started this segment with a commercial starring the ubiquitous Kelley Ripa ... Regis Philbin's co-host on the Regis and Kelley show and the modern-day "superwoman" in commercials for household products. In those commercials, Ms. Ripa successfully juggles work and family and looks good doing it. She is the effortless host of lavish dinner parties ... the happy wife of a square jawed husband ... the mother of cute, well-behaved kids. Oh, and she also has perfectly chiseled arms. All in all, she's pretty much guaranteed to make many women feel inadequate, angry and maybe even unhappy.

According to Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, women and girls are less happy now than their predecessors were 30 years ago and significantly less happy than men and boys are today. This despite the long list of gains achieved by the women's movement. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are Professors of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Their new journal article is called The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. And they were in Philadelphia.

Last Word - Daffy Cruel

We ended the program today with a little music that touches on a few of the items we've been talking about today. Earlier we spoke about Ontario's plan for full-day, integrated child-care and kindergarten. We discussed the nature of cruelty. And while this song may be cruel to Elvis fans, it's been a big hit with kids over the years. So this one goes out to the kids. We played the tune with Daffy Duck, and his rendition of the King's Don't Be Cruel.