Mr. Speaker, I confess I am new here and I do not know all the rules, but I always thought it was against the rules to bring pets into the House of Commons. I have just noted that in fact there is a big elephant in the room, an enormous elephant that we are not focusing in this debate. It is quintessential to the discussions surrounding the budget, this elephant is, yet no one seems to be discussing it.
Of course I refer to the Liberal plan to institute a national government-run babysitting bureaucracy, or what the Liberals call a national day care program. We might be hearing something about this elephant in the upcoming budget, but we are not yet sure. I would like to discuss this enormous elephant in my address to the House today with regard to the budget that we expect to see here at the end of February or in early March.
Let us start with the principles that the Liberal government says this elephant will be guided by. The first principle, of course, is one of the Liberals' catchphrases. They love using this word even though they are not quite sure what it means. They call it universality. They plan to put into place a government babysitting bureaucracy or an elephant that can universally carry every child on its back; that is what they are promising, anyway.
The Liberals have been promising this for the last 10 years. In 1993 they promised this elephant. In 1997 they promised this elephant. And in 2000 they promised it. Now they are promising it one more time.
It is not that I worry they will not keep their promise. I am actually worried that they will on this particular subject, because this elephant will be anything but universal. The social development minister has told us that the national day care program he proposes will only go to government sponsored day care facilities, which means by definition that this national daycare system will not be universal.
It will exclude parents who make the decision to raise their children in the home. It will exclude neighbourhood nannies or others in the community who give community based care to children. It will exclude synagogues, mosques, temples and churches in communities that provide child care throughout the day. It will exclude qualified professionals who operate private facilities where children are cared for throughout the day.
I do not have my dictionary with me, but as far as I know, if some program excludes 80% to 90% of potential recipients then it cannot be, by definition, universal. This is a universal program that excludes 85% or 90% of children. That is the first point. That is my first problem with this elephant.
Second, the Liberals say they intend to provide this program for 2,500 children. We know there are more than 2,500 within the specified age group, so once again, it will not be universal.
We should keep in mind that even those parents who do choose alternative methods of raising their children, who choose not to use the government babysitting bureaucracy, will still have to pay for it. That would be like forcing people to pay at my restaurant even though they do not like what is on the menu and even though they have not dropped by to patronize the facility.
So it is not universal and it will still make others who do not use it pick up the tab.
Let us discuss the cost of this elephant, because I can assure the House that it is going to be very expensive to feed this beast. The Liberal government says $5 billion over five years.
Can we have some common sense here for a moment? Do hon. members really believe that $1 billion a year, spread across this entire country, the second biggest nation on earth, is going to adequately finance a universal day care program? The Liberals are going to spread $1 billion across 10 provinces and 3 territories.
I suspect that in my province of Ontario we would get something in the neighbourhood of $300 million a year. Is it really realistic that the Liberals are going to bring in a universal day care program in the province of Ontario for $300 million? Of course not.
Then they are going to unionize all of the professionals who will work in these facilities and be faced with labour turmoil and potential strikes like the kinds we see in other sectors. And they expect us to believe they are going to be able to do all of that for $1 billion a year nationwide?
Excuse me, but I am a little bit skeptical of this elephant we have in the room today. Ultimately it is going to cost a lot more. We know what the Liberals said about the gun registry. They said it would pay for itself. It is costing us $2 billion.
We know about the massive overexpenditures that have happened in other departments. We are sure to see similar overexpenditures in this new bureaucracy, which will ultimately mean higher taxes for middle class families and parents with children. It will mean that parents who have the responsibility to care for kids are going to be paying more to the government in higher taxes, which means there will be greater stress on the family unit. It will continue to be more difficult for parents to raise their own children, thus defeating the purpose of having this elephant in the room in the first place.
Then the Liberals talk about quality. I wonder who believes that this government can be trusted with raising our children. Let us look at the way in which it manages other programs.
Consider the Canada pension plan. I am a young person. If I could invest the premiums I am forced to pay into CPP myself, I can assure members that I would be receiving a much higher rate of return than the 2% or 3% maximum, optimistically, the government managed program could ever pay.
Consider our military, with submarines that will not go down and helicopters that will not go up. This is a government that has horribly mismanaged our national defence. As recently as the catastrophe in south Asia, we were unable to transport our troops because we do not have heavy airlift capacity. It is another example of blatant government mismanagement.
Consider Technology Partnerships Canada, where the government recovers only 5% or 6% of all of the loans it gives out. And it considers this program a success. A recovery rate of 5% would bankrupt any of the major banks in the country, but somehow this government considers that to be a marvellous success. I guess it is the same kind of logic that would lead them to believe that a child care program which only serves 5% or 6% of the nation's kids is universal. But we will return to that in a moment.
I would be remiss if I did not propose an alternative. I believe in parents. I believe in the truism that civilization is passed on from parent to child and that our civilization exists today because parents have carried out that duty and responsibility. That is what we on this side of the House of Commons believe. We would take those same child care dollars that this government would give to a babysitting bureaucracy and we would give it to parents directly. That is because we trust families. We trust parents. We believe that no one loves a child more than its own parents.
In conclusion, I would like to announce that the colour of this elephant, of course, is white, and the only value-added it brings to this debate is that potentially it will carry on its back the Minister of Social Development and the Prime Minister to legacy land. Other than that it does not serve our nation's children and it goes clearly against the norms that have built our civilization and against the priorities of the Canadian people.