Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Mississauga—Erindale.
Truthiness: something that is spoken as if true that one wants others to believe is true, that said often enough with enough voices orchestrated in behind it, might even sound true, but is not true.
Truthiness: $1,200 a year before taxes for every child under the age of six. The words say it is for child care but of course the money can be spent on anything: a brace for a child with a disability; for parents who work hard and never get a break, a night out; gas for the car. All good things, maybe necessary things, but still anything.
This is not a voucher and yet it is called the universal child care benefit. It could be called a universal transportation benefit, an affordable housing benefit. We could call it anything we want. And theatrical indignation and political outrage do not make it any different.
Truthiness: The word “universal”; we think of universal in terms of education or health care, something that is for everyone, but something that also meets basically all our needs in education or health.
Here, $1,200 before taxes. After taxes, for a family with an average income, less than half, less than $2 a day.
The average cost of child care in this country is $8,000 a year. Even your neighbour down the street who takes in two or three other kids costs more than $5,000 a year.
Here, $1,200 a year before taxes; after taxes, for a family with an average income, it amounts to less than $2 a day. The average cost of child care is $8,000 a year. It even costs the neighbour down the street, who takes in two or three other kids, more than $5,000 a year. However, the government says it is for everyone so it is universal. If we were to give 10¢ to everyone that would also be universal.
Truthiness: choice. Let us take the full $1,200 a year and imagine that every penny of it will go for child care, to give every benefit of the doubt. Let us pretend that truthfulness is actually truth. Will that $1,200 a year enable a family to afford to choose child care when otherwise it could not? Will it enable it to afford truly better child care? Will it put enough more money into child care as a whole to enable notoriously poorly paid child care educators to get paid better, to encourage the right people into the field and to keep them there, to offer the safe, interesting, exciting learning place parents want for their kids? No, no and no.
Will it enable a family to make a different choice? For one parent, usually a woman, to leave the outside workplace where she earns an average salary of $25,000, perhaps $17,000 or $18,000 after taxes, because now she has $1,200 or less in her pocket; $17,000 or $1,200. Let us see. Choice. Providing a broader inability to do just about everything. Choice? No.
Truthiness: the national system of early learning and child care we were creating with the provinces, the Conservatives called it “institutionalized child care”, “socialist style child care”. “Just governments putting money into each other's pockets”.
We have no federal child care centres and no provincial child care centres. What we do have are some municipal child care centres. They know that. The biggest child care provider in the country is the YMCA. The great majority are Bunny Bear Day Care and Tiny Tots Day Care. They know. They are in their ridings. Do Canadians talk about kindergarten and elementary school as institutionalized education? I do not think so. Why here?
“The only experts are mom and dad”, the Conservatives like to say. Moms and dads are experts. They have to be. However, what do moms and dads say about their daughter's grade two teacher? Is it possible that here and there parents might be looking for a little help to help them be even better parents?
Truthiness: Why say things that they know are wrong? Why do they not want the public to understand? What are they trying to do here and for what purpose?
The $250 million a year to build child care spaces is for bricks and mortar. We have a shortage of spaces and we have wait lists. If we encourage businesses and community groups to build these spaces, the logic goes that they will come. Who will come? Who can afford $8,000 a year. That is more than it is for university. We must remember that there is no other money here for subsidies. Who will come and who will not come and, if they do not come, who will build it?
Truthiness: The $1,200, let us call it what it is. It is a family allowance. If that is what makes the government proud then it should be proud of it. It should be proud of the truth but it is the truthfulness that is wrong, obscene and offensive.
It is the same throughout this budget for low and middle income Canadians, for aboriginal peoples, for students and for the environment. The government offers some programs because Canadians have said that each matters and matters a lot. It uses words that suggest more, deliver less.
Truthiness:
It is veneer. It is about now. It is about me. It is about illusion. We all want more money in our pockets, but Canadians also want more money in other people's pockets too. We want it now but for the future as well. To many people, this budget appeals to the least in us. We are so much more. This country is so much more.
It is veneer. It is about now. It is about me. It is about illusion. We all want more money in our pockets but Canadians also want more money in other people's pockets too. We all want now but we all want for the future as well. This budget appeals to the least in us. We are so much more. This country is so much more: not a vision but a blink.
What are the words we hear most often about the Conservatives' campaign platform in the last election and about this budget? It is clever. It is smart politically. All that is said with a sense of admiration for pulling it off, for its truthiness, and all the time in a rush to the next election wanting to move so fast our heads cannot stop spinning long enough for us to discover what truthiness really means. But in order for them to win the next election, who has to lose?
Black is black and white is white except if we need black to be white and then we call it white. We do it again and again, louder and longer, until black seems white. However, it is not and it will not be. In the Conservatives' early learning and child care and the rest, the more we look the less is there. Truthiness.