Mr. Speaker, on Friday I raised a question with the Minister of Human Resources Development to whom I had given notice. Eleven ministers of agriculture for Canada had agreed to an initiative to help with community development, particularly concerning child care. The Department of Human Resources Development had allocated some $720 million for 150,000 child care spaces in this budget year. I was asking how much of that would be dedicated to rural child care.
I raised this question because we have just come through a harvest season which is a very busy time on farms. As always there have been reports of some injuries to children because of the exigencies of harvest.
The modern farm is not the idyllic place that we read or think of in mythology. There are huge machines around. There is noise. There are chemicals. There are factory type buildings. There are sinkholes that children can get caught in. There are grain augers. There are all sorts of hazards for children. It is not a place particularly for very small children to be involved. However, both parents of necessity are required to contribute to the work, especially in busy times and it is unsafe and quite impractical for those children to be among the machinery and animals on the farms.
There has always been difficulty in setting up child care facilities for rural areas because of the low population and great distances and the need for very flexible hours. Families will sometimes need child care for short periods of time during harvest and seeding that would run from eight o'clock in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. The rules that have been set out for urban child care just are not adequate and do not fit.
For the decade and a half that I have been in this Chamber, I know of groups that have been trying to find a model for rural child care that is flexible, that will work, and that provides all of the requirements for children and still provides the basic necessities available for urban child care but can be adapted to rural communities.
We have watched a model of child care develop at Langruth, Manitoba. That very small community of some 500 souls has developed a child care facility that meets all of those requirements. It has been in operation for about two and a half years and provides child care for some 40 children. It is considered to have overcome most of the organizational problems, the service delivery models and particularly provides the required flexibility.
There is an old saying that it takes an entire village to raise a child. All communities whether they are strung out rural communities or local neighbourhoods in cities understand that. Particularly in an era of the global village we understand that the whole of society must contribute to the raising of a child. Therefore it is only fair that the money which has been allocated for child care should also be equally available to rural families.
I would hope that the government would state how much, what proportion and what its plans-