Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Fundy Royal.
The Prime Minister recently suggested that the new national child care program will help to define us as Canadians. As a result, should we not take great care to ensure that the program reflects the values of Canadians, that it actually works for Canadians?
Unfortunately, the national child care program being proposed by the federal government is deeply flawed. We all understand the reality facing hard working Canadian families today. Unlike previous generations who had the option of having one parent stay home with a child, the majority of families either by necessity or choice have both parents working full time. As a result, these families face child care challenges that were not an issue for those previous generations.
How the state will respond to this new reality has been an issue of considerable debate. However, one aspect that should not be up for debate is the issue of choice. We must ensure that parents have choices and options in determining the best child care for their child.
I am happy to state that the Conservative Party supports freedom of choice for parents on child care. Our party realizes that parents, not the federal government, are in the best position to decide how to care for and educate their children.
Regrettably, that is not the position of the federal government. The Liberal plan for child care is a one size fits all bureaucratic model with little to no knowledge of the different needs of working families across this vast country. There is no acknowledgement of the needs of rural communities, shift workers or stay at home parents.
Will working families living in rural communities, like the towns in my constituency of Blackstrap, Outlook or Viscount, have the same access to the national child care program as those in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. We know the answer to that.
The Liberal Party's vision for child care is designed primarily for urban centres and will generally exclude families living in rural Canada where no day care facilities exist even though their hard earned tax dollars will fund the program.
How will shift workers benefit from a national child care program? The Liberal plan is centred on outdated notions of a 9 to 5 work day, increasingly at odds with the realities of the modern workplace. Political commentator Paula Simons stated that if we work evenings, weekends or early mornings, if we work long hours or odd shifts, day care is not a viable option. She said that in our 24/7 corporate culture, where at least 30% of Canadians do shift work, that means day care, no matter how cheap we make it, no matter how many spaces we create, can never be a universal solution.
How will the Liberal child care program help these Canadians? We know the answer to that too. It will not. What about a family where one parent has decided to stay at home with the child? What message is the federal government sending to these families when it says that it is going to spend public money to support child care in Canada, but the parents of that child will not qualify because they chose to stay at home? They made the wrong choice.
It is demeaning and insulting to the 47% of families with children between six months and five years who have at least one stay at home parent according to a Statistics Canada study.
In fact, I asked some of the more zealous advocates of a national child care program to be a little more sensitive when speaking about the deeply personal choices stay at home parents have made. For instance, the member for Beaches—East York, speaking in the House on a prior occasion, suggested that stay at home parents were merely capable of providing lesser child minding and not true child care for their children.
For those families who have sacrificed a few of life's luxuries and indeed even necessities to spend time with their own child in those precious early years, it is a little deeper than simple child minding.
I am not sure how someone cannot see why a mother of her first child would think that her child would be better served bonding with her than spending time with a child psychologist or a child development worker. I understand and indeed most Canadians also do too. According to the Vanier Institute family study, 9 out of 10 Canadians feel that in a two parent situation, ideally one parent should stay home to raise the children.
Yet, stay at home parents, along with those in rural Canada and shift workers, who will not have access to the Liberal day care plan by choice, opportunity or necessity, will subsidize this program. What is the government member's response to this? A shrug of the shoulders. According to the Minister of Social Development, this is all to be expected because we really do not know and in fact, we do not need to know because the future is going to be decided.
Canada's national child care system which, according to the Prime Minister, will define this country will never truly meet the needs of all Canadians as presently constructed. That much we do know.
Another troubling aspect of the Liberal approach is the manner in which the federal government has reacted to provinces that have a different concept of child care. Some provinces have suggested that they do not want to focus exclusively on institutional child care.
For instance, when New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord suggested that his province may utilize portions of the federal child care funding to provide enough support to make a difference to stay at home parents to provide for their children, the Minister of Social Development threatened that New Brunswick would never see any child care funding unless these alleged hardline demands were abandoned. He said that if that is an area of priority for that province, then that is an area it can act on in its own way.
Maybe the Minister of Social Development should discuss his concept of federalism with the Minister of Transport. When the member for Outremont followed the announcement of a newly improved parental leave program for his home province, allowing Quebec to run the program in a manner which it deemed best for its citizens, he said that it showed that we can be flexible and that there was no need to have a wall to wall solution.
Why is the national child care program any different? Why does the concept of federalism, as stated clearly by the minister's colleague, not extend to child care options for provinces like New Brunswick? Why does he not want a wall to wall solution imposed on the provinces? I strongly urge the Minister of Social Development to heed the advice of the member for Outremont and be more flexible in recognizing the fact that each province is unique and faces different challenges in assisting the child care needs of working families.
According to a Statistics Canada report, the percentage of Canadian children cared for nationally in day care centres is 25%, while 34% are cared for by a non-relative, like a babysitter or a nanny. However, those numbers are dramatically different in my home province of Saskatchewan, where 54% of children are cared for by a non-relative and only 10% are cared for in day care centres. To simply impose upon Saskatchewan, or any province, a program that is not flexible and adaptable to its own special circumstances will not result in the intended consequences.
Different provinces have different child care needs. Different Canadians have different child care needs. There is no one size fits all wall to wall solution. Consequently, when we discuss child care, we need to broaden our scope beyond the realm of institutionalized child care and seek approaches to give working families more choices, not fewer.
That is why I believe the Conservative Party's proposal is the right direction. It puts freedom in the hands of working families with direct cash subsidies and allows them the choice of formal child care, day homes, relatives, nannies or stay at home parenting.
Depending on what they believe is the right choice for their particular circumstance, there is nothing more personal than the choice families make about the care of their child. Should we not ensure that the choices available are not restricted for Canadian families?