Mr. Speaker, I look forward to the opportunity today to put a few thoughts again on the record with regard to a national child care program and to say at the outset that we in the New Democratic Party disagree profoundly with the motion put forward today by the Conservatives.
We have been clear from the very beginning that we need a national child care program that is worth its salt and that actually will deliver on the principles that so many people have worked on based on research from many jurisdictions in the world. We need a national child care program that will provide a quality product for which we can all be proud and one we will speak to in the same tone as we speak today as Canadians to our health care system and our education system.
However we need to dissect the very simple approach offered by the Conservative Party in the previous federal election and over the last year, and in fact coming to the House for the second time in a matter of a month for debate.
The Conservatives' program of tax deductions for parents and their suggestion that it would somehow provide choice is actually the opposite of what would happen. Their program would not produce choice. It would limit choice. All of the experts, if we believe the experts, the research and the experience in Quebec, say that simply giving tax deductions to families does not create one new child care space. If we do not produce child care spaces, then the families in rural parts of the country, in small communities and in remote parts of the country, have no possibility of experiencing quality child care and quality early development for their children.
What the Conservatives are proposing today by way of this motion is to actually pay parents to stay home. We know that parents are already making choices and they want the government to support them in their choices. They want the opportunity to put their children in quality, safe, developmental child care spaces so they can be secure in the fact that they are taking advantage of every possibility to have their children grow, develop and become contributing citizens.
The motion today is a scheme to pay parents to stay at home but it will not create choice.
The program put forward by the government in consultation with provincial premiers goes a lot further to actually achieving a national child care program than what we are addressing here today but it does have some serious flaws. We question the government's commitment to really putting in place a program that lives up to its definition of national.
For the moment I want to focus for a second on the offering of the Conservatives. They have asked the government to cost out its program, and I agree with that. The government should be willing to tell us what it will cost and where the money will come from and it should be willing to put in place a mechanism of accountability on this. However the Conservatives did not do any analysis at all of their own proposal.
I know the figures I put forward here this afternoon will be a bit out there in terms of the extreme case scenario if what the Conservatives propose actually happens, but nevertheless we have to think about that and we have to understand how that might play out.
The idea of paying stay at home parents, at the centre of the Conservative child care policy, was recently trashed by two reputable University of Toronto economists, Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky.