Human Resources Committee on April 26th, 2007

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Okay.

Moving on to P.E.I., and 11,000 kids times $9,000, do you have $99 million that you can make available for this legislation?

[Jeanette MacAulay]

No.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

No. Okay, that's interesting.

For the Northwest Territories, at 2,772 kids times $9,000, do you have $24 million that you can make available for this legislation?

[Charles Dent]

No.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Interesting.

Moving on to the City of Toronto, I already know the challenges you have. I was a city councillor for five and a half years myself. I know that municipal resources are really stretched. The costs for Toronto, being such a large city, to do universal day care would actually be $1.92 billion.

Dalton McGuinty obviously took the $97 million that you eloquently mentioned and decided to take $72.5 million away from children in Ontario, which was certainly disappointing.

What expectations do you have that Mr. McGuinty would extend child care money to the City of Toronto? And if he didn't, would the City of Toronto have the fiscal capacity to execute this plan without any funding from Dalton McGuinty?

[Janet Davis]

I'm not sure what plan you're speaking of. This legislation doesn't lay out a set of fixed expenditures or transfers, so I don't understand the costing you're using.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

The costing I'm using is the $9,000 figure used by Ms. Chow.

[Janet Davis]

In any event, we would support moving to serve all of the children who need child care in Toronto if we had the financial capacity. Clearly we don't at this point.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Do you have the expectation that Mr. McGuinty would give it to you?

[Janet Davis]

We are optimistic that the federal funding will eventually be transferred to us. There is a provincial election coming this fall. The Ontario government has made commitments. It made commitments in the last election to spend $300 million on child care. There's a lot of pressure on them, so we're optimistic.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Certainly I think a lot of people would hope that would be brought up in the provincial election about Mr. McGuinty's failure to pass on that $72 million given by the federal government.

Looking at this another way, one thing that Ms. Savoie conceded two days ago that might be a bright spot for you is that it wouldn't actually have to be universal. She said the Quebec model was 50%, so her expectation would be 54%. You'd only have to extend it to 54% of children, which is roughly half.

Referring to the numbers I mentioned before, would you be able to pay for half of that to implement this legislation? Would you be able to pay $350 million, Ms. Streatch?

[Judy Streatch]

No, I can't find that money either.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

See, here's the challenge: I'm getting the sense that the expectations this legislation would put upon the provinces are really pie in the sky.

Ms. Savoie said there'd be no new federal money, but it looks as though to implement this, there would be gigantic figures. So it comes down to three scenarios. Either you're going to pillage federal resources for health care and environment to find this new money or you're going to pillage your resources. You're going to have to go to your premiers and say, “I need all this funding to implement this private member's bill”, so you're having to pillage your health care resources, your environmental resources, and the social services that are important to your province. Or there's a third option, which is that we don't actually pass this legislation.

So if I could get your guidance, should we take option A and pillage federal resources; option B, pillage provincial resources; or option C, don't adopt this legislation? Could I have some guidance from the two provinces and the territory?

[Charles Dent]

I said in my comments that I think the bill should be scrapped and that we should get back to the negotiating table. That would still be my position. I hope there's a federal investment at the end of the day, but I'd like to be involved in determining how it's apportioned.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Would that be option C for Nova Scotia and P.E.I. as well?

[Judy Streatch]

I'm thinking of the three options, and the federal allocations that go to the other programming; I would be hard pressed to go to my colleagues and ask them to give me their dollars. I don't think they'd appreciate that very much.

So I don't have any desire to start pillaging funds from other departments or other agreements.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

Good to hear.

And P.E.I.?

[Jeanette MacAulay]

As a good public servant, I'd like to say there's an option D—that we do get back to the table and start talking, as we have before, about the issues facing children in this country, and accessibility and affordability of child care, not necessarily through this act but through the federal-provincial-territorial tables.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

But on this specific act, what would you say?

[Jeanette MacAulay]

No.

[Patrick Brown, Conservative, Barrie, ON]

No. Okay. Good to know.

Thank you.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

On a point of order, Madam Chair, I've heard this $9,000 mentioned several times. In different cities and provinces, there are different numbers.

So on the record, for Nova Scotia, allocation for each regulated space is $1,549, not the $9,000 that was used. The $9,000 is specifically the maximum dollar amount for Toronto, which includes the provincial and the municipal and the parents' fee, plus the fundraising and the bake sales. That is the dollar amount. It does not apply across the country, just so we know.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Ruby Dhalla]

Thank you, even though that's not a point of order.

We're going to go on to our next speaker so that we can get out of here on time.

We have, for the next five minutes, Mr. Merasty and Mr. Savage splitting their time.

[Gary Merasty, Liberal, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thanks, Madam Chair.

Most of you, but not all of you, were in the room when I asked the previous federal officials a question specific to the first nations issue. Some of you have bigger populations than others. Western Canada certainly has a huge on-reserve aboriginal population.

It's been very clearly stated that the feds can't overrule or step into provincial jurisdiction when it comes to child care regulations, so on and so forth, but there is a bit of a gap here when it comes to on reserve because there is a federal responsibility there. The bill right now is silent. There's talk of an amendment. The Indian Act right now very clearly allows bands to pass bylaws on controlling weeds, but they can't do anything on child welfare and so on and so forth.

The question for me, and I'm getting asked this by the aboriginal community and first nations on-reserve communities in particular, is where do they fit in? What would your thoughts be with respect to this bill and that particular issue? How would we fund, how would we move forward together on trying to create child care spaces and early learning opportunities on reserve, within your existing frameworks?

[Charles Dent]

It's an interesting question given the fact that in the north we don't generally have reserves. In the 2005 agreement, we brought this up with the previous government as an issue. The federal government still has an obligation to aboriginal peoples, whether they're on reserve or not, in our opinion, particularly in places like the north, where we've chosen not to implement the reserve system.

The previous government was prepared to allocate some of the funding from the 2005 agreement to bands in the north, whether they were on reserve or not. I would hope, in any case, we would be able to negotiate a similar situation if we're talking about funding in the future.