Ken Dryden

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, as I mentioned before, every program that is offered by anybody represents choices made and choices not made.

What I very much look forward to is the time at which the member's party decides to come forward with its program. I look forward to seeing what choices are made there, what those choices represent, who has benefited and who has not benefited. We all know what choice they came forward with last May and June: a $2,000 tax credit, which would offer the princely sum of an advantage for the lowest income child of $320 when the average cost of child care is over $8,000.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I really do not even know where to begin to answer any of these questions because they are so remote from the experience that anyone lives. The 70% of families with both parents in the workplace have voted with their feet. They have decided that this matters to them a lot, that this experience for their children matters to them a lot.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, the hon. member is just plain ritualistically and jargonistically wrong in everything he says. All one has to do is look at the experience of what is being offered by child care centres now and what would be offered under this kind of program. Clearly the hon. member has not taken the time or the trouble to take in that experience for himself.

I would wish for him that at some point he would, that he would move beyond a piece of paper, that he would move beyond arm's length learning and in fact go to the source. I would wish for him that he would go into a child care centre, see what it looks like, see what it feels like, see the engagement of those children, see the look in their eyes, and see how they move around, adventure, explore and are engaged.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, once again the hon. member completely misstates what in fact is the plan and is being done.

If the hon. member wants to compare apples with apples in terms of an education system, of elementary and high school, up to a certain age all children are required to attend school during that period of time.

Home-schooling is absolutely a choice under early learning and child care. Anyone who does not want to have their child as part of early learning and child care can home-school their children. At the same time, different from an elementary school or a high school, which is a five day a week and a 40 week a year understanding, that is not what early learning and child care is. There is a much broader choice as to what a parent may want.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I am not aware of the answer to that question. I will take it under advisement. We will try to find the answer for the member.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, in the interests of being brief, first of all, I never said what he said I said. Second, I do not believe what he alleges. I believe what I have said every time I talk about the issue, every time I have talked about it tonight and as anyone who has been a parent. I am a parent of two children. I take very seriously being a parent of two children. They are 30 years old and 27 years old. We were a central part in raising them, as all of their other activities were a part of their being raised, and as early learning and child care can be a part of the development of a child as well.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, everything is put at risk. That is what happens. It is a very simple thing. It is at risk or it is not.

As the great majority of Canadians have expressed, this is something that matters to them. It matters a lot to them. The question that I have been asking for the last month or longer is, “What is the rush?” What is the rush in all of this for something that the public is looking for, expects and hopes for? It is an amount of money, $700 million this year, that represents a 30% increase on all money that is spent by all governments in this country at this particular time for the kind of benefit we are talking about.

In whose interests is a budget bill put at risk? Finally, after all this time, we are moving toward a real system of early learning and child care, which people have worked so long for. We are finally getting this kind of push with the kind of public reaction that has happened with those announcements and here we have some members of the House deciding to put it all at risk.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I appreciate the comments and the question from the member for Beaches--East York. She has worked very long and very hard on this issue. We talked earlier about not a lot happening before the commitment that was made last year. It is voices like hers and others in the House that kept it very much alive and allowed this sort of thing to happen.

The question mentioned the range of programs and supports that the Government of Canada provides for children and parents. There is the Canada child tax benefit, the national child benefit supplement, maternity and parental benefits through employment insurance, the child disability benefit and the rapidly expanding understanding the early years initiative. This is the context into which to put the government's commitment of $5 billion over five years to support provincial and territorial efforts in early learning and child care.

At the centre of a child's life is their relationship with their parents. That has always been the case, it is the case and it always will be the case. The lives of parents and the lives of families can and do change over time. The challenge for a child to develop and learn to his or her fullest potential remains the same. Early learning and child care is not, was never intended to be and never will be the only answer to a child's development, just as elementary school and high school are not understood as the only answers to learning and education.

Simply put, early learning and child care is a tool, one of many, for a child's development and for parents to use as they see fit. We must never forget that for the great majority of Canadian parents early learning and child care is an important tool. Seventy per cent of parents with children under the age of six are both in the workforce.

The great majority of those kids are in child care of some form, but not in a form that is good enough. Only 20% are in regulated care and not in a form that reflects the importance of learning and development in a child's early years, not in a form that utilizes best the opportunities of all those hours of a day, days of a week, weeks of a year, years of a life, all the possibilities. With this time, is it an opportunity to be realized or an opportunity that will be missed?

We want parents to have real choice. We want them to have the chance to choose quality, to choose affordability and to choose availability. We did not build schools by putting money into parents' pockets and then asking them to get together if they wished to put some of that money into a pot to build a school or to hire teachers. We did not build hospitals or roads that way either. We decided that schools, hospitals and roads were important enough to enough people and were important enough to our present and future society that we put that public money directly toward them. That is what we are doing with early learning and child care.

At the same time, there is remarkable flexibility in an early learning and child care system; the scale is so small, the system so much still evolving. The Government of Canada comes to agreement with the provinces and territories on the principles, expectations, understandings and accountabilities. The provinces and territories decide on how best to meet those obligations, with the flexibility to find different answers for rural areas and big cities and with the flexibility to meet the circumstances of linguistic minorities, off hours or specific needs.

This is not an elementary school. This does not require a core of 150 students and millions of dollars for a building to make everything work. Nor is early learning and child care an all or nothing: something for eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year or nothing. No, it is not all or nothing. Even most stay at home parents want some time in the week for their children to have other experiences with other kids in other places. Early learning and child care can be two mornings a week or a day a week for parents and kids as they see fit.

Nothing ever offers an answer for everything. The health care system does not. The education system does not. Even if we would like them to do more, doing what they do matters, and matters a lot. We are a lot better off because of them, and we will be a lot better off for an early learning and child care system in every province and every territory in this country.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I will share the answer with my two colleagues.

Very quickly, in respect of his first remarks, happily I was in the net on a team where I was rarely bombarded with pucks, so that was a good thing.

In terms of the basic tone of what the member said, I do not accept the tone. I do not accept the tone of frittering away, of wasted money, of competing in that way. The experience most of the time in most circumstances is something that really is a collaborative arrangement. Even in the last number of months, whether it was negotiations over parental leave, earlier in terms of health care, all of them involved negotiations with the government of Quebec. All of them led to resolution in terms of the government of Quebec.

I will pass it over to my colleague in terms of the member's questions on seniors.

[Business of Supply, May 31st, 2005]

Mr. Chair, we indirectly help support those centres now. They do good work.

As I said earlier, in terms of providing services for parents and for kids all kinds of different services are needed, and that is one of them. They do good work. I would suspect that a lot of the child care centres, five or ten years from now, will have that kind of component. It will be almost naturally within them.

One of the great advantages of a child care centre is that three year olds cannot walk to it by themselves. They need to get there somehow. They need to get there with their parents. Their parents have the opportunity to walk through the door of a child care centre in a way which they cannot do in an elementary school or a high school.

Once they are through that door things can start to happen. They can see what is going on. They can meet with other parents, talk with other parents, and talk to the people who are there. They can learn. They can turn something that was an accident into something quite important and useful. That is what the natural evolution is going to move toward.