Thank you for inviting me. I'm pleased to be here.
I'm particularly impressed with the teleconference, which is, I think, a way to get a lot more public and women's involvement in issues.
When you are discussing Bill C-303, I have to say that it's pretty well impossible to be against a bill to benefit children. I have, for 30 years now, argued for you to be looking at issues like this, to spend more money on children's care, to value the role of the person taking care of children, and to notice that these are pivotal years for the education of children, so that's all good.
I'm not here to criticize the bill for what it says, so much as to criticize it for what it doesn't say. It is actually excluding some important considerations legally and ethically. I've been a long-time promoter of women's rights, to value our paid labour and our unpaid labour, and to value children's rights. This bill is working for educational stimulation, health and safety, the right of women to participate fully in society in ways that they wish. All of those are good goals, but this bill is a problem because it doesn't go far enough.
This bill doesn't give all children benefit. It looks at only one lifestyle and gives it the benefits. That's a concern. So this bill, although good, needs a sister bill in order to be fair. It needs a partner to value what it left out. It did leave out children who are not in the child care settings being provided for--the third-party, non-family-based care. That is actually the majority of children. It omitted children in parental care or grandparent care; the care of a day home, a trusted neighbour, a sitter; home-schooled children; in the care of parents who telecommute, parents who take the child to paid work, parents who do paid work evenings only and weekends off-shifting. These people are also parents and they're also offering care of children, and they vote.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Canada signed at the United Nations, said a child has the right to be raised in the presence of the parents, wherever possible, and if the parents choose to assign a caregiver, trusting the best judgment of the parents, the caregiver can be anyone who shares their values, their language, their culture, and the things they want to endorse. The parents are the ones trusted to know the best interests of the child.
Children outside the centres are valuable too. This bill has forgotten them. In section 15 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we're told that we have to give equal benefit under the law to all children. So Bill C-303's problem is that it's not universal. It says it gives universal access, but that's a legalistic trick and couldn't hold up under a court. Access to agreeing with a policy isn't really access to equal benefit under the law.
Bill C-303 suggests a majority of women now earn, so they need this bill. In fact, it says its purpose is to help women earn. That's a problem, actually, because if we're going to value care of children, we shouldn't as a main focus be valuing those who are not caring for children. Many women in fact do earn, but they do so from home or part-time and aren't using the third-party-care style.
So this is not in any way a universal benefit program.
You have been told there are wait lists of children who need this service. That may be true in some ways, but the wait lists are a little bit inflated, because children's names appear on several lists and there are names on those lists of children not even born. So it's a little deceptive, and we're not sure the wait-list people are not just waiting for the funding.
Proponents say there's a patchwork of services and we need to standardize. You know, in a democracy a patchwork is actually a good thing because it's a quilt, it's diversity. What we have to be really wary of is something that requires a standardized one-size-fits-all treatment. That's what got us in trouble before.
Proponents of Bill C-303 say universal child care is like medicare. Universal child care is not like medicare. We all risk emergency need of medical assistance if we have sudden illness or injury. Because of that equal risk we have, we pay a universal payment for health care. Child care centres are not locations of emergency risk, and employees are key, but they're not experts the way that medical doctors are experts.
Proponents of Bill C-303 say it's like universal education. We should start it from birth. The problem is that they don't have a monopoly on education. A child is born learning; it's born ready to learn. So although a child may learn in your child care centre, it's not learning any differently from or any better than in some very high-quality homes. Therefore, we should value education wherever it's happening.
Schooling and medical care are actually moving away from the one-size-fits-all formula for funding institutions. They're actually moving towards funding the home. We're trying to get more people cared for medically in the home. It saves money.
We're trying to get diversity for home schooling and other kinds of education to match the needs of the children. So to move to a one-size-fits-all standard is out of touch with what's currently found to be best.
Also, Bill C-303 will cost $10,000 per child per year. Just for the preschoolers in the country, it would $20 billion. The day care federations are saying that their goal is to provide a day care space for every child in the country. We simply cannot afford that.
Let's look at what we can afford that is still of universal benefit. The only way we could make that affordable is to raise taxes, as they do in Sweden, to a 60% tax rate.