Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak again to Bill C-35. As I said in my previous speech about this bill, no parent is perfect. I can attest to that first-hand; I make lots and lots of parenting mistakes. However, parents are the best proxy decision-makers for their children because parents have a deep and natural love for their children. This love that parents have for their kids generally ensures a rectitude of intention. “Rectitude of intention” means that parents always want what is best for their children. If they make mistakes, they at least do so from a place of love, wanting to give their children the very best that they can.
I trust parents to make decisions for and about their children. There are, of course, extreme cases in which external authorities have to take over parental decision-making, but the possibility of these extreme and rare exceptional cases should not be used to justify a general policy of having the state interpose itself between children and their parents. While the state can aspire to a kind of general goodwill for all people, this general goodwill is nothing compared to the fierce and natural love that leads parents to always want the best for their children.
Before I come to the particulars of the child care issue, I want to say that we are seeing broader challenges in many areas to the idea that parents should be trusted to shape the direction of their own families. We see movements to have teachers, school counsellors and therapists facilitate dramatic and potentially irreversible changes in the lives of young people without the inclusion of parents, in fact with the explicit exclusion of parents. Why does anyone want to exclude parents from important conversations about the lives of their children? Parents love their children and want the best for them. Of course parents make mistakes, but someone motivated by deep love is less likely to make mistakes and is certainly quicker to correct their mistakes than an official, institutional bureaucracy driven by politics and constrained by inertia. That is why everything that happens in a school, in a child care centre or in any out-of-home program should happen in the context of an openness to conversation with parents. I remember my parents' telling me, as a child, “If anyone tells you not to tell mommy or daddy anything, make sure to tell us right away.” That is still very good advice.
This country has a history of parental alienation, of a state bureaucracy taking children away from their parents in an explicit effort to disconnect them from the culture and values of their families. This was wrong. Today, I am hearing from families, and, most recently, especially from Muslim families, who are concerned about parents' not being included in conversations about how the state and state institutions are relating to their children. This is something we have to be vigilant about.
Going forward, Conservatives will always stand on the side of parental choice and on the side of not excluding parents from important conversations that impact the lives of their children, because the role of the family is at the heart of a Conservative belief in the importance of subsidiarity. The federal government should not stick its nose into the business of the province, and neither the federal government nor the provincial government should stick its nose into what is properly the business of the family. In our federation, this constant sticking of noses into other people's business has led to redundant and inefficient expenditures in many areas and has obscured what should be clear lines of accountability.
With respect to parents and parental involvement in the lives of children, I noted one line in particular from the minister's speech about this child care program. It was a quotation from someone else that she read, but a quotation that I think she read approvingly. She said of these programs, “They are shaping our little people into who they are going to be in the future.” That is undoubtedly true. Part of the reason parents want to choose so judiciously what child care options they select is that child care providers do play a role in shaping critical aspects of how a child sees the world. All education is informed in some way by underlying world views. There is no such thing as value-neutral education, so parents will generally want to pursue an alignment between the values they are teaching at home and the values being promoted in programs outside the home. Therefore, when the range of options is narrowed, it becomes harder and harder for parents to find that alignment. Choice and flexibility in child care make it easier for parents to find programs to facilitate a good alignment between child care provider and family.
Parents should have an opportunity to seek to pass their core beliefs on to their children. Of course children grow up, and there is a natural process of children being exposed to more of the world as they grow more and more, in due course coming to their own distinct conclusions on things. That was certainly my experience growing up. However, parents can and should be able to provide an intellectual foundation that allows children to know where they come from and receive the wisdom of those who love them most and best.
In my last speech, I focused on the practical and economic arguments for choice in child care, but there is more to it than just that. I believe that parents should be able to make decisions about the kinds of child care arrangements that are best aligned with the economic and practical needs of their families, but even more importantly, I believe in choice in child care because I believe in respecting the role of parents making choices about how they will seek to train children in virtues, traditions and practices that are particular to their families. Children should begin life knowing and growing upon the firm ground of their families, and this requires that parents are able to shape the environments that their children are in.
Having said that, I would like to shift to another point, that of workforce participation. This has come up a few times in different ways in different speeches that have been given tonight. Liberals champion, as a feature of this plan, that it would increase workforce participation. By increasing the cost the taxpayers pay and channelling those dollars into a particular model of out-of-home child care, this puts more financial pressure on families that do not use the state system, which likely forces some of them to opt to enter the workforce.
By taxing all and subsidizing some, this approach tips the scale in a certain direction, and I think the argument goes that this tipping of the scale leads to higher levels of workforce participation, which is identified as one of the goals. The Conservatives' preferred policy is one that supports families without tipping the scale. That is that it finds ways of supporting families that do not involve the arbitrary redistribution of resources among families based on their different child care choices.
On the issue of workforce participation, I want to clarify an important distinction. Workforce participation measures the proportion of people who want to work while the employment rate measures the proportion of those people who are actually working. Therefore, people who choose not to work are not considered unemployed. They are considered not in the labour force. People are considered unemployed if they are in the labour force, that is if they wish to work, but they are not able to find a job. Again, people are not in the workforce if they are choosing not to be in the workforce, and people are unemployed if they are choosing to be in the workforce, wanting to work, but are not able to find a job.
Clearly, we should seek to minimize the unemployment rate. We should seek to have as low as possible the number of people who want to work and who are not working. We want as high an employment rate as possible, but it is not obvious to me that we should always aim for the highest possible workforce participation rate. There are many good and legitimate reasons why people might choose not to be in the workforce. It could be because they are studying, retired, of sufficient means and would rather spend their time volunteering, or attending to the needs of their families. All of these are, of course, forms of work, but they do not formally count as being in the workforce. That is that they are not forms of work that are commodified.
There is nothing wrong with people making these kinds of choices to opt out of the workforce. We should not be so narrowly mercantile as to suppose that the only way for a person to live a good and productive life is by generating income and paying taxes. Rather, we should focus on the advancement of overall happiness and well-being on the discovery of the true, the good and the beautiful, and on facilitating this by trying to build a society in which people have the prosperity and the freedom to maximizing their own happiness and well-being with choices.
I do not see any reason why we should set a goal of public policy to achieve the greatest possible participation in the formal workforce. If someone has well-considered reasons for not working inside the formal commodified marketplace, such as the ones I described earlier, I do not see a problem. Why should the state seek to push or incentivize someone to move in a different direction than they wish to go when it comes to workforce participation? Ideally, I would like to see people be able to study if and when they want, to take time off work if and when they want, to retire if and when they want and to stay home with their children if and when they want.
For plenty of practical reasons, this is not always the case, and personal preference is not the only factor that shapes our lives, but why should the state aim for the highest possible labour participation rate by increasing taxes and subsidizing those choices that involve higher workforce participation? Why tip the scale in this direction?
The state should aim to allow people to make their own choices, presumably choices that they believe will maximize their own happiness and the happiness of their families. If a woman or a man, having the means to do so and with a view to their own assessment of what is best for their family, decides that they want to work part time or not work at all for a period of time for the sake of being with their children or for some other purpose, I do not understand why we in the House of Commons should presume to tell them that there is something wrong with that choice, nor should we in the House of Commons presume to tell a dual-income family that there is anything wrong with their choice.
However, the government's policy is to use higher taxes to subsidize certain kinds of families to make certain kinds of child care choices over others. Increasing taxes to subsidize certain kinds of choices over others does not advance freedom or choice.
The Conservative policy of offering direct support to families allowed parents to have the means to freely make their own choices, motivated by love for their children and unfettered by economic coercion. It is support for all families without tipping the scale.
Regardless of the particulars of the child care policy, nobody has made the argument in this place, as far as I have heard, that higher workforce participation is a good in and of itself. Presumably, existing retirement and post-secondary support programs are an acknowledgement that higher workforce participation is not always desirable. If the government cancelled existing retirement supports, I suspect workforce participation would then go up, but this would still be a bad policy, because it would limit the ability of the retirees to choose to leave the commodified workforce during their golden years.
Of course there is a gender dimension to this workforce participation discussion. Statistics suggest that women are more likely to opt out of the workforce for some portion of their child-raising years. I suspect that we would find women are also more likely to opt out of the workforce for post-secondary education, since right now women are attending university at much higher rates than men.
Certainly, we should seek to ensure all people are able to make their choices freely, without any kind of coercion. Regardless of the reasons or the circumstances that lead people to want to opt out of the workforce, we should seek to maximize choice and flexibility for everyone, but it seems to me to be grossly paternalistic for the state to presume some kind of false consciousness operating in the choices that many women make in this respect. The state should seek to promote prosperity and freedom; how people then choose to use that prosperity and freedom inside or outside the workforce should not be the business of the state.
I want at this point to highlight some of the key points I made previously in this debate.
Number one is that this bill substantively does nothing, other than establish an advisory council. All of the agreements are already in place; this bill is merely an active self-congratulation by the government.
The government has put in place a system that is not effectively achieving its own stated goals. In fact, what we see with the current system is that by subsidizing child care but in fact not sufficiently to align with the promises it has made, and at the same time by regulating prices, it has put a great deal of strain on child care providers.
The people one would expect to be most enthusiastic about this program, child care providers, have actually been in many cases the most vocal in expressing concerns about it. What they are saying is that combining subsidies, at the level they are, with price regulation makes it very difficult for child care operators to invest in and grow their business and offer those additional spaces over time.
What we are seeing is a kind of ticking time bomb created in the system: The government is over-promising at the same time that it is imposing enormous strains on those who are actually providing child care services.
I would warn the parents who feel they are benefiting in the short term, because some families have seen reductions in their costs while many families are still on waiting lists and many families are paying higher taxes because of the current government, those who are experiencing short-term reductions in costs, that the structural damage the government is doing to the child care system, by putting strains on child care providers, is not going to allow child care to deliver in the long term.
One of the speakers on the government said that this is about establishing a generational long-term promise. Not at all. What the government is doing is using deficit spending to underfund while over-promising child care operators, who now face enormous strain, cannot bring in new staff, cannot expand, and creating a system that is simply not going to work over the long term. It will not fulfill the promises it has made. We have seen this in many aspects of this government's record, the over-promising and under-delivering. I would encourage those who are following this debate to listen to child care providers to hear from those who are working in the system.
When we raised these concerns with the minister, she asked why we were so negative. She said that Conservatives are always criticizing and being negative about the things the government is trying to do. I think our job in this place is to tell the truth, even if telling the truth about the trajectory of government policy involves pointing out that there are flaws and risks. We hear this accusation a lot from the government by the way. A couple of years ago, when our leader was talking about how overspending was going to lead to inflation, the Liberals said we were being negative, but it was true.
We will continue to speak truth to power and highlight the problems of the child care approach.
