moved:
That the House call upon the government to address the issue of child care by fulfilling its commitment to reduce taxes for low and modest income families in the upcoming budget, and, so as to respect provincial jurisdiction, ensure additional funds for child care are provided directly to parents.
Mr. Speaker, our members will be splitting their times and I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar.
I am pleased today to introduce a motion calling for the government to honour its throne speech commitment to reduce taxes for lower and modest income Canadian families.
We also urge the government to take advantage of the coming budget to keep its promise on child care, while respecting provincial areas of jurisdiction and meeting the needs of Canadian families.
We call upon the government to give any new funds for child care directly to parents themselves. This debate comes just after the government's apparent failure last week to reach a federal-provincial agreement on child care and it gives the government one more chance to get things right and act on 12 years of broken promises.
As we all know, the Liberal Party has been promising Canadians a national child care program since 1993, so the recycling of this promise in the 2004 election was no surprise. However there is one major reason that the Liberal vision of child care will inevitably fail. In listening only to the government funded experts, who dominate the child care debate, the government has completely lost touch with the needs and aspirations of Canadian parents.
Parents have made it clear that they want choice and empowerment when it comes to deciding how they can best take care of their children.
A recent survey by the Vanier Institute of the Family asked parents to rank a series of possible child care options. Parents' first choice for raising their children was their spouse or partner. Second was a grandparent. Third was another relative. Fourth was home-based day care. Fifth was institutional day care. Finally there was the option of babysitting by friends or a hired sitter.
But the message is clear: parents want choices and they want to make those choices themselves. Yet the government's preferred option is to make the choice for them, to take parents' tax dollars and plough all available money into one option, that of supporting institutional day care centres, an option that parents themselves rank fifth out of six.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that I am a parent myself, with two young children. They are now in the early years of school and have just passed through the more intensive years of preschool care. Laureen and I chose a healthy mix of various day care options for our children. Some of this care was provided directly by their mother, especially in the first year and a half. We also have used close relatives. We have employed caregivers and, for a number of years, Benjamin and Rachel attended a regulated, institutional day care centre on a part time basis. For us, fortunately, all of these experiences have been good experiences, but for us the key has been choice, and in this party we want to ensure that a similar range of choices is available to and affordable for all parents.
It is certainly a mistake to assume that parents with choices would overwhelmingly select regulated, institutional, not for profit child care. This is not the experience elsewhere. Finland, for example, provides high quality, municipally run day care centres, but it also offers a monthly home care allowance for parents who choose to take an extended leave of absence from work in order to care for their children. The evidence shows that almost 70% of parents with children under three choose home care, while only 11% choose formal day care centres.
This brings me back to the other issue we raised in our motion today. Parents with children often indicate that they would prefer to stay at home or work part time in order to care for their children, yet at the same time a high percentage of parents with young children both work outside the home, often full time. I have no doubt that some of those parents would prefer and do prefer access to quality institutional day care, but what these facts tell us is that a large number of those parents would prefer to stay at home, work only part time and spend more time with their children were they able to do so.
Is it not possible that part of the reason so many parents with young children work outside the home is that our tax system makes it all but impossible for them to do otherwise?
Canada is almost unique in the industrialized world in providing no tax benefits to married couples and almost no tax benefits to families with children, beyond a very low income threshold. Other countries provide tax benefits like income splitting between parents, an additional basic personal exemption for children, or universal per child tax credits or deductions. Canada provides nothing except for the universal national child benefit and tax deductions for institutional care.
The Conservative Party certainly supports the existing deductions and the national child benefit program and would like to see this enhanced, but the benefit program does not provide enough assistance for many lower income parents to be able to consider staying at home to raise their children, and it provides next to nothing for parents once they are in the middle income range.
Rather than devoting billions of dollars to a child care program that will help only a small group of parents, that will pay for structures rather than services, that will lead to even higher government spending and higher taxes for families, and that runs the risk of conflict with provincial governments, we urge the federal government to devote much of the money to cutting taxes for lower income and middle income Canadians, enhancing the existing tax credits for families with children, extending them to more families, and using tax relief and credits to help support those choices that Canadian parents want to make for their own children.
The tax system is completely within the jurisdiction of the federal government, so there is no need for complex negotiations or confrontation with provinces that may have different priorities.
The best division of the work, one respectful of Canada's federal nature, is what was agreed on when the National Child Benefit was created. In other words, let the provinces define the child care program they want, which may or may not include in regulated daycare spots, while the federal government provides financial support to parents and children through the tax system.
These changes could begin as early as next week's budget.
If the other parties in the House support this motion, it would be a strong signal to the government that it is time to end the pipe dream of a universal program of institutional child care and instead replace it with a universal program of supporting Canadian parents as they make their own choices for their own children.
