Carolyn Bennett

[Business of Supply, May 4th, 2006]

No, Mr. Speaker. There has been no consultation. The answer is therefore no, absolutely not.

[Business of Supply, May 4th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to explain the hon. member's misinformation on just about everything. That party brought down the government in November and as a result, there are no spaces available at Andrew Fleck this year.

The member knows perfectly well that in 1993, when child care was in the red book, it was a cost sharing agreement. The member knows better than anyone else that we did not have a partner in Alberta nor did we have one in Ontario. It was only when the hon. member for LaSalle--Émard became prime minister that Liberal women's caucus and the caucus as a whole were able to persuade the provinces. A unilateral $5 billion was put on the table that they could take or leave. We asked them to work with us to build child care, and we abandoned the proposition of cost sharing, which had failed. Therefore, we were able to put all of this in place.

The hon. member and her party should be ashamed, now that these waiting lists continue to grow. They support a government that clearly has no plans for early learning and child care.

[Business of Supply, May 4th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, it is very important to recognize provincial jurisdictions. However, it is also very important in our opinion to recognize that all Canadian children must get the best possible start in life.

We have tried to help Quebec achieve its objective of 200,000 spaces this year in licensed services, and I think that our federation would have benefited nation wide from the best of the Quebec model.

[Business of Supply, May 4th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I would invite him to go to the Andrew Fleck centre to which I referred. That program would have assisted children with autism. Many families have acknowledged they cannot do this at home 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is an extraordinarily difficult situation.

I had a patient whose twin grandchildren suffered from autism. I know how much help that family needed in terms of support from the community.

I also remind the member that some of the most poignant letters have come from his riding. One letter states:

I am totally opposed to the program proposed by your government. Quite frankly, $1200/year for my youngest daughter, taxable to boot, does nothing for me. I have been extremely involved with my daughters' childcare centre for the last 4 1/2 years and can assure you that this province's childcare system is in crisis.

The letter goes on:

As if the lack of qualified staff, lack of funding and astronomical costs weren't bad enough, our daycare centre faces additional challenges in that it is the only French daycare centre in Edmonton and one of only two in Alberta. Yes indeed, I am a francophone and my husband and I have chosen to raise our children in French, which is still one of Canada's official languages.

These are the kinds of letters we are receiving from across the country about this ideology overriding the kind of flexibility and creativity that the minister had negotiated with every province, Alberta being number one. The member should be ashamed.

[Business of Supply, May 4th, 2006]

moved:

That the House recognize that an effective, Canada-wide early learning and child care system requires both continued vigorous effort to provide supports for family incomes and proactive intergovernmental activity to create a sufficient number of high quality, universally accessible, affordable and developmental child care spaces to meet the broad range of needs of Canadian children;

that the House observe that the present government has made, in both these tasks, significantly less progress than its predecessor, which had provided income support programs for families with children totalling more than $10 billion per year and had negotiated child-care space-creating agreements with all provinces valued at at least an additional $1 billion per year; and,

therefore, that the House urge the government to increase substantially its activities in this regard in order to provide Canadian families with the early learning and child care facilities that they need and deserve.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this motion because Canadian families face a genuine crisis caused by the shortage of quality child care and early learning services in this country.

This government has torn up federal-provincial agreements that would have created up to 350,000 day care places over the next five years. It replaced this plan with a cash allowance that offers only minimal benefits and that in no way allows for the creation of places in early learning and child care services.

I want to begin by asking, what is the role of government? The role of government is to govern. It is not to use administrative tactics to pander to its supporters as they exist. This is about the future of the country. The future of the country is about our aboriginal people, about post-secondary education and research innovation. The future of the country and the planet is about climate change, but the real future of the country in terms of human capital is our kids.

Today, this motion is about why the Prime Minister of the country would agree to not cut and run on the people of Afghanistan, but is prepared to cut and run on our kids. It is extraordinary that ideology has replaced evidence based practice and real research on what will underpin the future of our country in terms of social justice and what will underpin the future of our economy as a country in a globalized world.

That being said, in 20 years as a family doctor, I cannot imagine that there was one time, as I delivered a baby, that the parents or family did not have a huge understanding of the challenges facing them as parents and the choices that they would have to make in terms of being the best parents possible and offering the best possible opportunity to their children.

There were some families that actually did have choices. There were two parents, one at least with a fabulous job such that there was a choice. One of the parents could stay home. Even in that situation, there were situations where that parent that was able to stay at home needed the support of a community drop-in centre where there was some help in terms of the kinds of things that could happen.

Some of those children may have had special needs and special concerns. Some children may have had autism where it was virtually impossible for those stay at home parents to give the kind of care that they would want 24/7. But for those families there was a real choice in terms of a parent being able to stay at home.

For the other parents there was a choice, as well, and they had to decide whether with two incomes they could actually support their child in a better way and perhaps move out of a certain neighbourhood, or change a balcony for a backyard. Those were parents making the best possible decision for their children.

I think it has been extraordinarily unfair to be fanning the flames of a fight between those difficult choices that those sets of families have had to make in our country and to pit one choice against another choice as a better choice, or indeed to say that parents did not know what was best for their kids and could not make the choices that were best for their children.

Today's motion is very much about the people who have not had choices, who know they have to go to work. They know that they need affordable early learning and child care spaces in order for them to do what they have decided is best for their child. For those families whose children are still on waiting lists and therefore have no choice, this is the insult of this government plan. It is referred to as choices in child care. In fact, it is a family allowance that has absolutely nothing to do with early learning and child care, and is indeed the most insulting thing that I have heard in a very long time.

There is too much misinformation out there and I think that it is extraordinarily important that the government understand how it is flying in the face of the public's understanding of the importance of the best possible experience for kids in their early years.

Statistically, 94% of Canadians know that the most critical years for brain development are in the first six years. Regardless of a family's background, 89% believe that poor quality child care hurts a child's development. Some 79% believe that child care providers who have had more training provide better care. Child care services have passed some important hurdles. It is extraordinarily important that the parents who need to go into the workforce do so and 94% of Canadians believe that child care is essential to allowing that decision. Approximately 90% know that it is important in assisting a child's education and 78% see it as important to developing stronger community ties. We all know that isolation is one of the most important determinants of poor health.

It is important as we go forward that we not deal with ideology. We should deal with the facts and the research that is there. In fact, province by province in this country, in determining what would be the best for the children of those provinces, elected to sign on to an agreement with the Government of Canada to use the $5 billion in a way that was completely flexible and best for the families in their province in order to go forward.

Three of the 10 agreements were fully funded before the NDP decided to sellout and help force the unnecessary election. In Ontario alone, 25,000 new spaces would have been created in the first two years, including investments in training in quality programming.

In Quebec, the aim of the agreement was to allow the province to reach its objective of 200,000 spaces in licensed services this year and improve both the quality and availability of training in all regards.

The Manitoba agreement, meanwhile, placed special emphasis on creating spaces in rural and remote areas, in stark contrast with this government's insistence that the Liberal government's early learning and child care strategy catered only to urban families. Quite clearly we have heard from many people in Manitoba how important this is in terms of protecting the family farm for those spouses who have had to come into town to work in a bank or a hospital in order to be able to keep the family farm. Those families know they need affordable quality child care, like in small-town Ontario, and this government does not seem to understand that.

Quite frankly, I am convinced that the Prime Minister and his caucus have never actually read these agreements, because it was so clear how carefully the provinces had designed what would be best for them. Other provinces had detailed plans. I think the members from Saskatchewan should understand that cancelling the full universal preschool program for all four year olds in the province of Saskatchewan is devastating to those people who thought those children would be going to school this fall, those people who thought they would be going into the workforce.

Alberta focused on training because in Alberta almost 80% of early learning and child care is done in the private sector. Those operators wanted to have those funds to be able to go back to school so they themselves could qualify as regulated child care space operators, with the understanding that parents have much more confidence in a place that knows the public health requirements and those kinds of things around exercise, nutrition and the training of those workers.

Last week the Leader of the Opposition and I were able to visit the Andrew Fleck Child Care centre here in Ottawa. It is one of the examples of the kind of quality child care that helps children get the best possible start in life. There is an exciting range of programs offered there, programs that are inclusive, supportive, flexible and fun for children. This is a centre that provides all kinds of care, including flexible hours, drop-ins and playgroups for families where a parent is able to stay at home. It is inclusive programing that meets the needs of today's diverse families, including those with special needs.

The Andrew Fleck centre is also designed to offer caregivers answers to questions with information about programs and services that are available for young children, and an opportunity to talk to early year professionals as well as other parents and caregivers in the community. It is a truly integrated service for Ottawans and their children and has been since the early 1900s.

It is what will happen to that centre that is the issue of today's motion. The two story building next door currently has 30 children and the funding the centre was to receive from the early learning and child care agreement would have been used to renovate the whole building and create an additional 34 spaces, including integrated spaces for those special needs children and especially those children with extraordinary special needs, children with autism, in order to help those families. Because the funding was lost, the centre cannot renovate. The building is now so old that there will be no spaces in the building. Essentially the loss of funding means the loss of 64 child care spaces for Andrew Fleck alone.

Meanwhile, this government's plan offers the vaguest of promises to create child care spaces. The government has backed away from the tax incentives as a solution because it now understands that it would not work and it is just not evidence based. There were seven pages in the plan for discussion of the new family allowance, yet less than a page for the discussion of creating spaces; it was funding starts only and costs only. There was nothing for the ongoing costs of service delivery and nothing to ensure the quality of care. It is the same approach that failed under Mike Harris, and here I have to say as a member of Parliament from Ontario that we cannot let the Prime Minister do to this country what Mike Harris did to Ontario.

The government keeps saying that giving parents money gives them choices. They cannot choose what does not exist. All families can benefit from child care and early learning services. I remember in the very early days of prenatal education how it was very important for people to understand that the community needed to help those expectant mothers and their families understand the best they could about how to become a parent.

Nobody would question the need for communities to support prenatal education. We are now saying that with extended parental leave and all of the exciting things that we as a Liberal government were able to do, it is a necessity to have parent-child drop-ins in communities, and it is important to have licensed child care, early learning activities and after school programs. We have to get around the rhetoric of this government, which continues to explain, as though we do not know, that parents are the experts.

Of course parents are the experts in terms of raising their children, but some of these experts, as parents, have come together in boards to put together what they think is the best for the community and their needs. Those parents now sit on those boards and are making sure that the experience of those children is the best it can be in terms of the best possible start in life.

The real catastrophe, however, is the fact that the plan gives little to those who need it most. Taxing the allowance based on the salary of the parent with the lower income means that low income families will keep only part of the allowance, while those better off will keep the most.

It is astounding that the $249 young child supplement is being eliminated so that wealthy families can have their share. Those on waiting lists will continue to wait. As we have said, there is the single mom who will not be able to go back to school and also what have seen on so many of the petitions, such as the nurse who thought she was going back into the health care sector but who will not be able to go back because her child will stay on a waiting list.

I thought that “a hand up, not a handout” used to be a Conservative mantra. What happened? How are single parents struggling to get off social assistance and get jobs or the training for better jobs going to do it if there is no one to look after their children? It has often been said that the real measure of a civilized society is in how it treats its most vulnerable. If that is true, then this so-called plan represents a giant step backwards. What happens when parents cannot read to their children?

As members know, Fraser Mustard has been studying this for a very long time. It is appalling that the government would not understand his extraordinarily seminal work in understanding what other countries around the world are picking up on, whether that is India, China or South America. It is going to be extraordinarily important that children have the capacity in terms of literacy to be able to compete in a globalized world, to be able to partake of a post-secondary education. We know that starts at the earliest possible time and that we actually must do this in order to compete economically in a globalized world. Besides, it is just the right thing to do.

There is huge evidence that money invested in early learning translates into savings down the road, both socially and economically, and in health care, social services and correctional services. We know that is the case. We know from these programs, particularly in Vancouver, that by having an early learning and child care program we can identify at the very earliest stage a child with FASD and be able to help that mom, who may herself have had FASD, get the kind of help that she needs for her dependence on drugs or alcohol, and for her then to have that kind of intervention so that she does not have a second, third, fourth or fifth child affected with FASD. If her first child had not been identified in a program such as this, she would go without those really important services.

I am offended that the minister, who knows that she is abandoning the most vulnerable of Canadians, would kind of deflect this by pitting families against one another, fanning the flames of this extraordinarily important choice that every family in this country makes in terms of what is the best choice for their families, also understanding that by taking away the choice for our most vulnerable families, she is putting our country at risk and she is flying in the face of basic Canadian values of social justice.

I am thankful for being able to articulate today how much the people of Canada support what was the Liberal plan. On January 23, 63% of Canadians supported a party that supported the Liberal plan for early learning and child development. It is extraordinarily important for us to understand that 89% of Canadians have been clear that it is important to offer the same level of services to everyone. Eighty-nine per cent have said it is important to make quality child care available to everyone. Eighty-eight per cent have said it is important that child care be inclusive for children with special needs. Ninety per cent have said it is important to make quality child care affordable for everybody.

It is so important now as we go forward to understand that the choices have to be real choices. There cannot be real choices if these families do not have a place in their community to take their children to if they are staying at home, to get the kinds of services they need or to be able to make a choice of re-entering the workforce and being confident every day they are in the workforce that their children are getting the best possible experience and the best possible start in life.

I cannot say strongly enough how proud I am of the Liberal record on this, how proud I am of how quickly after the member for LaSalle--Émard became Prime Minister that our minister was able to go across this country and negotiate these 10 deals with the provinces, because it is so important to those families and those communities.

We call upon the government to substantially increase its activities. Please listen to the research. Please do not hide behind individual little payouts and handouts. Give the vulnerable families in our country the handout they really need.

I hope we will see some changes. We cannot wait to see this approach dealt with properly in committee.

[Child Care, May 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the minister knows perfectly well that the research shows that if we do not invest in early learning and childhood, for every dollar we spend in that we will save $7 later in special education, corrections and all those things, and you know that. Your answer was a short--

[Child Care, May 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday's budget confirmed what many Canadian families were afraid of. The NDP sold out to a government that has no plan to create new child care spaces. Out of nothing more than spite, the minister has cancelled agreements that were already creating new spaces and programs across this country. In its place is a minuscule dollar figure with no workable plan attached.

Why will the minister not tell us in detail how her government will create new early learning and child care spaces, or is it that she still does not know?

[Public Health Agency of Canada Act, May 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his support. He would need to take out a Liberal membership and I look forward to that.

In terms of the chronology, this was a very interesting project in terms of getting it from the order in council into an actual bill, but we are there now. As many of the speakers have said, this was a very challenging issue in terms of identifying the dual role for the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada to actually speak to Canadians as well as having deputy level status. That has been a hugely important first step and we are thrilled that this is coming forward. We are proud to support this bill.

Yes, I do think every kid in Canada should know how to swim. I hope the government is able to move forward on the healthy schools initiative in which all the deputy ministers of health and education across the country have come together to look at the kinds of things that we can do better together than apart. I hope that the swim to survive program of the Royal Life Saving Society is supported by as many jurisdictions as possible and I hope the Conservative government will help them do it.

[Public Health Agency of Canada Act, May 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. I think the agency really has almost three responsibilities related to infectious diseases, chronic diseases, as well as emergency preparedness. That it is always seen as a zero sum game. If we actually need to be moving forward on infectious diseases or pandemic preparedness, it is seen as though we might be taking resources from another area.

I think that the job of the government is to move forward on all of these issues and to ensure that they are properly resourced. The $300 million that we placed in last year's budget on integrated disease strategy was, and we knew, only a down payment. We know that we need more money for that.

The member has dealt extraordinarily well with the issues relating to the epidemic of heart disease and the epidemic of obesity. How we actually look to the future on the issue of diabetes is going to be hugely important and must be dealt with as its own epidemic.

It is interesting that the New York State public health department has now designated diabetes as a reportable disease, meaning that even though it is not an infectious agent, it is a contagious agent that is social. We need to understand that pockets of diabetes can be tracked and can be dealt with in a public health strategy in the same way as we would deal with any other outbreak of a disease cluster. We must deal with it in that way. Otherwise, this will be the first generation of kids who will not be able to look forward to living as long as their parents and for that we cannot sit still.

[Public Health Agency of Canada Act, May 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, we knew that the bill was just the framework to establish the agency and to ensure that within the bill there would be the flexibility to go forward in terms of regulations. We would want the bill to go forward in a way that would be fair, transparent and would get the job done. I think that the bill does that job.

However, we also need to look forward to the kind of work that will done by the health committee. As we move forward on regulations we must ensure that everything that needs to be done is there. However, the main thing that we will need to fight for will be the resources to ensure this is done properly because way too many resources are proportionately on the health care side as opposed to keeping people well.

I hope that in the future we will be able to have a way of looking at all government department responsibilities for the health of Canadians. The World Health Organization is now talking about this kind of thing and we have seen it in Quebec. Perhaps we should look at a health impact analysis of all government policies and budget items to ensure that everything we do that has an impact on the health of Canadians is recognized. That will require a whole of government response and not just what is in the purview of the Public Health Agency.