“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billion in pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

The whole article is worth reading but I'd like to highlight a few paragraphs in particular:

For over two years, the Tory leader has travelled across the country, galvanizing voters around three devastating words: Canada is broken. In one video streamed on his Facebook page, Poilievre lined up with voters outside a passport office in Ottawa, making a show of solidarity to the people stuck waiting six hours just to drop off an application. In another, he stands near a homeless encampment in British Columbia, detailing the human suffering he’s witnessed.

For those of us old enough to remember Poilievre as the most vicious of Stephen Harper’s boys-in-short-pants, it was jarring to see him dominate the political discourse with such ease.

Because no matter how many million of dollars the Liberals spent on some version of “Yes, we’re bad but have you seen how fucking crazy this guy is?”, they had no answer to his message. The Canada we were promised — the one where you’ll get ahead if you just play by the rules and work hard — no longer exists.

Roughly half of Canadians report living from paycheque to paycheque, with that number jumping to 57 per cent for those aged 35 to 54, according to a Léger study published in October. Meanwhile, a generation of homebuyers has been priced out of the market and those who can afford a mortgage are being crushed under a mountain of debt.

Canada’s household debt to disposable income ratio is 180 per cent. That’s the highest of any G7 country. For every dollar Canadians earn, on average, they owe $1.80 in the form of mortgage payments, car loans and credit card fees. In the United States, by contrast, that ratio is 100 per cent.

Over 2 million Canadians turn to a food bank every month just to keep from going hungry. That’s a 90 per cent increase from 2019 numbers.

As rental prices across the country have nearly doubled in the past decade, homeless encampments are now a fixture of life in every major Canadian city. In some pilot programs, provincial governments have outsourced the lodging of homeless people to private condo developers.

Universal public healthcare, the crown jewel of this federation, is coming under attack in provinces across the country. Half of our healthcare system is funded by Ottawa, and the federal government has done little to discourage the provinces’ slide towards privatization.

I don’t think Poilievre will fix any of this but he sees it. And because he sees it, he can turn it into anger, political donations and to a victory on April 28.