Madam Speaker, I am rising on a question that I asked in the House regarding child and family poverty, the use of food banks in this country, and the very dismal statistics that 38% of food bank users are children. In this context, I want to specifically address some of the issues that are contributing to child and family poverty. It may surprise you, Madam Speaker, but I want to talk about the impact child care has on women in later life.
In an article in the Vancouver Sun on January 24, 2012, Paul Kershaw outlined a number of factors that are contributing to the ongoing child and family poverty in this country. He indicated:
UNICEF reports that Canadian family policy falls among the worst industrialized countries because it invests little in families with children under age six. The OECD agrees when measuring public investments in child care services. Similarly, a U.K. Fairness in Families Index ranks Canada 15th out of 20 countries because our policy is weak in supporting men and women to equally share parenting and breadwinning.
Poor family policy rankings have tangible consequences in the day-to-day lives of Canadians, which result in lower retirement incomes for women.
Current parental leave policy provides the typical two-parent family with nearly $5,000 in incentives for the lower-earning spouse to withdraw from employment to care for a newborn, rather than share a year of leave between parents. Given that Canadian women age 25-44 continue to earn about 70 cents on the dollar compared to men’s earnings, the lower earner is most often the mother. The result is that Canadian leave policy encourages women to take on primary responsibility for child care, and discourages dads’ involvement.
He went on in his article to talk about the fact that because women have lower earnings, in their retirement years they end up with far less income. In particular, women over 65 who live alone have a low-income rate that is 40% higher than men who live alone.
He gets to parental concerns on child care. He said:
Inadequate parental leave isn’t the only family policy barrier to women’s earnings and retirement security. The fact that Canadian provinces typically have child care spaces for just one in five preschoolers is an equally significant obstacle, as is the high cost of the limited services that are available.
When a two-parent family with a toddler considers whether one parent (typically the mother) should stay home full-time, it is the cost of child care that is the major economic disincentive to a return to work. Child care costs dwarf the extra taxes the parent will pay on additional earnings.
In B.C., Alberta or Ontario, child care services will cost more than $7,200 annually, even after deducting child care fees from income taxes owed.
I need to point out that in Quebec there is a much more progressive child care policy. It has been demonstrated that that child care policy contributes to women continuing to have higher rates of earnings.
As a package, our family policies interact with cultural expectations about gender roles in Canada to pressure women to shoulder the lion's share of responsibility for child care at the expense of earnings and saving for retirement.
Canada's failure to make much progress on the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women from 1970 helps to explain why the World Economic Forum ranks Canada 18th on its international gender equality index, despite our formal commitments in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It is no coincidence that our family policy and gender equality rankings converge near the bottom of OECD countries. They emerge from a common cultural reality. Canadians are content to ask young women to sacrifice their earnings, career ambitions and future retirement security to compensate for our national failure to prioritize family policy investments.
I come back to my original question, to which I did not get an adequate answer at the time. Is the government prepared to invest in high quality affordable child care programs, or is its continuing answer to our nation's hungry children that they should just get a job?