Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Lynne, for that.
I think you have the best of intentions here, Madame Savoie, and I commend you for the effort you've put into this bill. But I think it is misguided. I'll make a few comments and I'd like you to respond.
We believe in federal leadership in certain provincial areas of jurisdiction—health care through the Canada Health Act and the Canada Health Transfer; post-secondary education and training, another area of provincial jurisdiction, through such federal programs as Canada research chairs and investments into universities and colleges and the like; federal investments and leadership on national infrastructure programs. And there may be other areas where the federal government will use its constitutional spending power to affect national priorities in provincial areas of jurisdiction.
However, we also, as a government, believe in the need for child care. We understand that Canadian working families need access to child care, but we also believe that provinces are best positioned to deliver this child care and early childhood learning. In some ways, early childhood learning is really an extension of the public education system, and no federal government of any stripe would dare to tell a province or suggest telling a province what they should do in their public education systems. Similarly, we believe that child care is best delivered by the provinces.
What works in rural Saskatchewan, what works in rural Manitoba, may not work in downtown Toronto or downtown Vancouver, or in Quebec. Every province has a different approach. Quebec has a $7-a-day program; Ontario has the Early Years Centres; every province has a different approach.
We acknowledge the need for child care, and that's why the government has invested a lot of new money into the transfers to provinces. We're investing a record $39 billion over the next seven years or so to enhance the transfers to the provinces, so that they have the resources to deliver the programs they have responsibility for.
The provinces are running surpluses now. The aggregate surpluses of the provinces equal if not exceed that of the federal government, so they have the fiscal capacity to do these things.
If you look at what was done previously, under the previous Liberal government, and at what we're doing now, I think the contrast is stark. The previous plan was $1 billion a year. What are we doing? We are providing, through the universal child care benefit, $2.5 billion a year directly to parents, and on top of that, $39 billion over the next seven years to enhance transfers to the provinces, so that they can deliver the services they're responsible for. I think we've done a lot to assist provinces in the delivery of this responsibility that they have.
The final point, which I'll conclude on, is that the reason I believe this bill is misguided is that the provinces won't agree to it. In the previous Liberal arrangement, there was a two-step process. There was an agreement in principle, which all the provinces signed on to. Because it had no conditions, all ten signed on, but when it got to the second stage of actually getting to the shared cost arrangements, many provinces refused to sign. When we took power, we found out that, as a matter of fact, a number of provinces had refused to sign on to these shared cost arrangements.
Presently, concerning this existing bill, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and the Northwest Territories have expressed opposition. The bill already admits failure, because in clause 4 it actually exempts Quebec from the provisions of the bill. I think that, combined with the cost—Quebec's system costs well over $1 billion a year, with a quarter of the population of the country, and that's at a 50% inclusion rate.... If you extrapolate that to the rest of the country, you are looking at something that could cost upwards of $5 billion and has all these cross-jurisdictional difficulties.
I think there are a lot of problems with this bill.