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It was a weird mix of earnest morality tales, scantily clad women, social commentary and jokes

As a young adult, my plan was to be more discerning when the time came for me to oversee my offspring’s viewing habits. For sure, I would let my children watch television. I was never going to be one of those parents who sends their kids to Waldorf schools and spends prime time planting organic vegetable gardens with them, even in my aspirational imagination. But I would be selective and see that my kids were exposed to messages that resonated with me and my values.

As I said, all this was before I had kids. Then my son was born, I experienced the stress of sleep deprivation and keeping a precious tiny thing alive, and all plans for carefully planning the intellectual underpinnings of his entertainment went out the window.

As a toddler, my son watched many hours of Mighty Machines a week, and I didn’t worry at all about how his world view was being shaped by badly voiced front-loaders because I was just so tired, and sometimes immediate parental sanity has to take precedence over future child character development.

Sometimes immediate parental sanity has to take precedence over future child character development

All of this has been on my mind this week because of Andrew Scheer.

In a video he shared online Sunday, the opposition leader defended the children’s show Paw Patrol, which was criticized in a recent CBC article (and the academic paper on which it is based) for turning kids into capitalists.

When I saw Scheer’s response, I didn’t know who to root for. Despite my being a diehard individualist and free marketeer (I sometimes wonder if this can be attributed to my extensive viewing of Little House on the Prairie), Scheer’s cheerfully reductionist Tweet made me cringe: “Free market capitalism built our country. So lets celebrate it, not condemn it!”

Hooray, free market capitalism! Bet that genius take changed a lot of minds.