Mr. Chair, I would like to say a couple of things on the child care file and then I have a couple of questions. One is on the clawback of the national child tax benefit supplement. Hopefully, if I still have time, I will have a question on housing.
My one critique of the government's roll out of the new child care funding is that so far it does not look like a national program. It is still very much a patchwork of agreements. Money hopefully will flow if the budget is passed, but there is no real framework that one could look at and say it is a national program. It is not like health care.
The government got off on the right foot with Manitoba and Saskatchewan in terms of their commitment to doing certain things. I was hoping that it would continue to follow that pattern as it went on to the other provinces and get them to buy into the same kind of promise of not for profit and community based child care. I think that will be best for families and children.
How is this a national program? If it is not, how does the minister propose to get there?
We have heard a number of comments from the Conservatives over the last number of months. First, suffice it to say we are not talking nanny state or babysitting here. That is simplistic at best to put that out.
We also need to recognize, and I think the minister would not disagree, that the work stay at home parents do and the contribution they make should be and needs to be valued. We need to find ways to do that. However, we should not hive one off at the expense of another. We need to address the issue and look at financial breaks for them, especially for those in need. It is wrong to pit them over and against a quality child care system. That is disingenuous to do that.
As well, I want to do a quick critique of the argument that there should be some kind of a tax benefit scheme for stay at home parents and the cost to the country to do that. I think the minister referenced that a bit.
Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky wrote a piece that I thought was rather informative. They said that the idea of paying stay at home parents at the centre of the Conservative child care policy did not make any financial sense. The $2,000 tax deduction, about $600 to $800 per child, for a typical family ignores the reality that paying parents to stay at home is much more expensive. That is another way of putting what the Conservatives want to do.
If a large number take up the offer to stay at home, the social cost will be astronomical. We would have to pay them at least the rate of maternity and parental benefits, currently 55% of their regular pay, up to $413 per week.Those benefits, which now cover the first year of a child's life, now cost about $2.7 billion a year. That is just the beginning year. If we multiply that by six to cover all preschool years, it would cost us more than $16 billion a year. I think we heard the number $10 billion a while ago to do this. I agree with them on that. That is probably what we are talking about at the end of the day if we are going to have a national program and hit 1% of GDP invested in this.
Economists have said, Charlie Coffey in particular, that for every dollar invested, there is a two dollar return down the line in a good quality national child care program. We are talking about $16 billion a year and we are not sure what the return on that would be, although there would be a return.
As I said a few minutes ago, I have no questions and no qualms with evaluating the contribution of stay at home parents and the excellent work they do bringing up their children; however, there is a cost.
Maternity and parental benefits cover only about 60% of all parents with newborns. It would cost $27 billion per year plus the billions of dollars in lost production to cover all families, in addition to the cost of lost income of those families and the cost of the government's current and future lost tax revenues.
According to these economists, this would cost the economy about $83 billion per year. If we were to add all that up, the cost of the Conservative proposal would be over $100 billion a year. That is what we are talking about. That is the Tory proposal. If we go with what the Tories have suggested, that is what we are talking about here.
The new national child care program that we are envisioning is one that will benefit stay at home parents. It will offer them respite. Parents who want to plug in at different times convenient to their schedule will be able to do that. A readily accessible child care program in a community will benefit every family in that community and is only limited by one's imagination.
Let me talk about the economics of child care spoken to very eloquently by Charles Coffey, vice president of the Royal Bank of Canada and just recently David Dodge, Governor of the Bank of Canada. For every dollar spent on child care there is a $2 economic benefit through increased tax revenues and decreased social, education and health costs. Charles Coffey said:
A child's brain development in the first six years of life sets the foundation for lifelong learning, behaviour and health. High-quality early childhood education produces long-term positive outcomes and cost-savings that include improved school performance, reduced special education placement, lower school dropout rates, and increased lifelong earning potential. Not only does high-quality early childhood education make a difference for children, it matters to their employed parents. Employers increasingly find that the availability of good early childhood programs is critical to the recruitment and retention of parent employees. It's estimated that work-life conflicts cost Canadian organizations roughly $2.7 billion in lost time due to work absences.
I guess we could add that to the Tory cost as well. David Dodge, Governor of the Bank of Canada, said:
While parents, along with some psychologists, sociologists and public health experts, have long intuitively understood the importance of ECD, it is really only over the last quarter century or so that scientists, physicians, and social scientists have come to recognize the crucial role played by ECD.
To sum up, the literature clearly shows that intervention to improve maternal and infant health, to support parenting, and to provide early childhood education is effective in improving readiness to learn at age six, thus raising the efficiency of primary schooling as a tool of human capital formation.
In the minister's view, what so far makes this a national program?